Confused Ideas from the Northwest Corner

My cats drive me nuts!

2012-02-09T19:37:00.000-08:00

The text used in my college survey course in psychology included a series of amazing paintings by Louis Wain, an early twentieth century painter afflicted with schizophrenia. Wain's paintings of cats became increasingly abstract and even frightening over time, as his symptoms worsened. My psych text offered the paintings, presumably, as an illustration of how the disease may affect the perceptions of its victim.

I found the paintings interesting for that reason, as well as aesthetically pleasing, and I've had them posted on this blog's sidebar almost since its inception. (I've always expected someone to ask some pointed questions about my interest in the paintings, but, of course, no one ever did.)

It never occurred to me that the subject matter of the paintings -- cats -- had any relation to Wain's mental illness. Not until today, when I read an article in this month's Atlantic.¹

If you spend much time around your cat's litter box, you've probably been exposed to a parasite found in cat feces called Toxoplasma gondii. T. gondii can be found in about 20 percent of Americans, and is known to be a health hazard to people with weakened immune systems. In healthy individuals, however, it causes at most mild flu symptoms before the parasite is overcome by the body's defenses and ends up dormant in the brain. This has been scientists' common understanding for many years.

But a Czech scientist named Jaroslav Flegr has discovered evidence that the parasite, rather than being dormant, works silently in the brain, rewiring connections in a way that affects the host's behavior. The purpose of this rewiring is to make the usual post-feline host, rats and mice, act in a way that will cause them to be quickly killed by another cat, and eaten. For example, the "rewired" rodent becomes sexually attracted to the odor of urine, a response called "fatal feline attraction." When the cat eats the rodent, it ingests the T. gondii that infects the rodent as well. The parasite finds itself cozily back in a feline environment, which happens to be the only environment in which it can reproduce. T. gondii has no interest in humans as such, and any effect by the parasite on human behavior would be inadvertent from an evolutionary standpoint.

But such behavioral effects do exist, Flegr has shown. For most of us, the effects are minor. Infected males, for example, tend statistically to become a bit more introverted, suspicious, uncaring about others' feelings, and inclined to ignore rules. (No, I'm not going to try drawing political conclusions!). But for persons who are genetically so inclined, Flegr believes, the parasite may also trigger the onset of schizophrenia.

Interestingly enough, so far as we know schizophrenia did not seem to exist until the late 1700's -- which is also the time when large numbers of urban Europeans began keeping cats as pets. And recent studies have shown that schizophrenia is two to three times as prevalent in persons infected with T. gondii parasites as in those who are not.

My cats and I watch each other, as we always have, with mutual curiosity. My own curiosity, however, is now tinged with surges of suspicion. Are my furry friends responsible for those psychedelic nightmares I seem to have at times? Do they explain the voices outside my window -- the ones just barely intelligible, but who seem to utter my name with contempt? I shudder. I feel increasingly introverted, as I regard Loki and Muldoon with a newly critical eye -- and with less concern for their own feline feelings than in the past.

The article does have reassuring things to say, I have to add, and I recommend its perusal to my own readership. I certainly suggest you read it before you drown your own cats, or before signing yourself into a mental hospital.

Still, one might be prudent ....
---------------------------------
¹ Kathleen McAuliffe, "How Your Cat is Making You Crazy" (The Atlantic, March 2012)

Free the Malvinas?

2012-02-08T10:54:00.000-08:00

I haven't offended a large nation for some time, so how about firing a shot over Argentina's bow? What's with all this latest news about Argentina and the Falkland Islands?

I don't have any strong feelings about the Falklands (or the Malvinas, as the Argentinians call them), but -- with all the various crises threatening world peace -- this seems like a strange time to heat up a strange issue.

At least, this time around, Argentina is simply filing a protest with the United Nations regarding the status of the British colony -- not attempting a sudden invasion as it did in 1982. The Argentine government also is reported to be contemplating banning (again) LAN Chile's weekly flight, over Argentina territory, between the Falklands and Chile -- the only regularly scheduled commercial flight to the Falklands, and a flight that carries food as well as passengers.

Despite the fact that the Falklands have been under British rule since 1833, and that all 2,500 inhabitants are English-speaking British subjects --70 percent of them being of British descent, with most of the others descended from French, Portuguese, Chilean, and Scandinavian immigrants -- the Argentinians continue to claim the islands as their own. Their claim is based primarily, it seems, on the fact that the Falklands are only 288 miles from the South America mainland, together with claims of British shenanigans before 1833.

The British say that the colony will remain British until the inhabitants vote otherwise. The British offered to submit the dispute to the International Court of Justice in 1947, but the Argentinians refused the offer.

While colonization ia generally agreed to be a bad thing, turning a close-knit community over to a foreign country that speaks a different language and possesses a radically different culture also seems a questionable practice.

If Argentina somehow succeeds, I think Canada should immediately demand title to St-Pierre and Miquelon -- a far smaller (93 sq. mil v. 4,700 sq. mi.) French territory located just 15 miles off the coast of Newfoundland. The six thousand inhabitants speak French and happily conduct their business using the euro, rather than the dollar. But they're much closer to Canada than the Falklands are to Argentina, and if propinquity is the key, they should be Canadian. Unlike the Falklands controversy, with its linguistic difficulties, lots of Canadians speak French. In fact, the erstwhile French islands could be united with Québec. So what if they like being French? They'd grow to love being Québécois.

It's strange that Canada allows the sore of St-Pierre and Miquelon to fester just 15 miles off its coast. Maybe Canadians are sufficiently self-confident to consider the islands a tourist attraction rather than an affront to their sovereignty.

The present rumblings from Buenos Aires seems to have more to do with Argentine internal politics -- Americans know how that affects foreign policy, right? -- than it does with any immediate plan to seize the Falklands. Apparently, "freedom" for the "Malvinas" is the one issue on which all Argentinians can agree.

Let's hope that this time, it goes no further, and that Argentinians can satisfy their national pride sufficiently by their prowess on the soccer field.

Music frozen in amber

2012-02-04T12:53:00.000-08:00

Despite frequently expressed concerns that "classical music" is a dying art form, in many ways, listeners have never had it so good. Not only is music performed live by orchestras and artists in virtually every city of any size, but a large number of interpretations of any given piece are available on CD (and vinyl).

Even those of us with the tinniest of ears appreciate that music heard in a concert hall differs from music heard at home on a sound system. Recorded music offers the closest the artist can come to perfection, albeit filtered through an electronic medium; live performance is more spontaneous, and the music may not be free from the performer's small errors or questionable judgments.

How does a musical piece get recorded and packaged for a CD? That's the question that pianist Jeremy Denk addresses in a witty and very well written article in this week's New Yorker. I've heard Denk play a number of times with chamber groups in Seattle. He's a fine pianist, and plays with odd postures and facial expressions that have become -- in my mind, at least -- his trademark. It's a pleasure to see past the guy at the piano to the man worrying about how his playing will sound once it's recorded.

Denk's writing reveals much of himself -- as does his playing itself, I'm sure, to those who know how to listen.

When I go home to visit my parents, my father has his stereo on all day. Surrounded by my junior-high-school spelling and typing trophies, I stew in my room, thinking of all the hours and tears that went into his musical wallpaper. I remember my parents hounding me to practice continuously, with the best intentions but without having to practice themselves. I fall prey to childish resentment: has my dad really earned the music that fills his house?

And he suspects that these recordings to which his dad listens, electronically tuned to perfection, aren't the real thing.

They're manicured artifacts, from which the essential spectacle of human effort has been clipped away.

But then Denk's manager asks him to prepare his own "manicured artifact," to record his interpretation of Charles Ives's "Concord" sonata. And so he shares his experience with us.

The first lesson he teaches is that the artist doesn't just sit down at a piano in front of a mike, flex his fingers, and let 'er rip. Instead, he plays each individual section of the sonata numerous times, varying his interpretations; the final recording is to be a composite of the best sections drawn from many playings. Then, Denk sits down with the sound engineer and listens to what he has played.

Every piano sounds different. Every individual microphone has different characteristics. The distance of each microphone from the piano, the angle at which it's oriented -- all these factors affect the sound that's actually recorded. Even when perfection in the instrument and recording devices seems achieved, the artist feels frustrated:

The most maddening paradox of recording is that what you hear in the playback does not resemble what you're sure you played. You hear two tracks at once: what you desire and what you have produced.

Denk and his engineer work their way, section by section, through the sonata, trying to match the recorded track to the ideal track in Denk's head.

He realizes, as he works, that technical perfection may not even be the proper goal. For example, slight misalignments in the piano's works, where the damper touches the string after each note, can result in what Denk calls an "aural schmear." He works with his engineer to remove all of these imperfections, only to discover that, once they're finished, they have somehow lessened the quality of the listening experience.

Eventually he [the engineer] plays me a schmear-free version. He looks so proud and satisfied that I can't bear to tell him that the result seems somehow sanitized. It's as if the reality of the piano had evaporated. I miss the schmear.

In the end, Denk, with the assistance of his engineer, pieces together relatively perfect segments of the sonata, recorded at different times, into a seamless whole -- resulting in an overall performance more perfect than any musician could achieve in a live concert.

And yet, the perfection achieved is never absolute. And it's in this lack of perfection that Denk actually finds relief -- there will always be something finer to which he can aspire.

No matter how wild the performance, something about the "Concord" always needs even more. I pressed eject on my stereo, thinking, No, you haven't made me redundant just yet. ... I realized that I couldn't wait for the next performance, when I would do it completely differently.

For me, for whom even the most familiar sonata contains subtleties that I can't even understand, let alone sense while listening, it's both humbling and inspiring to realize that a sonata is imbued with so much depth, with such complexity, that I could spend a lifetime simply listening to -- forget about playing -- the sonata and never exhaust what it has to teach me.

As for Jeremy Denk -- he's happy to realize that however perfectly recorded may be the music his dad hears on his stereo, it doesn't compete with the music he plays in live concerts. The near perfection of a studio recording and the spontaneity and "reality" of a live performance: each has its place, and Denk favors us with both.

One girl's struggle

2012-02-02T11:08:00.000-08:00

Somehow, I consider it a matter of pride to have no idea of what's going on in popular culture. But occasionally, popular culture sneaks up and bites me on the butt before I recognize it.

Thus, a week ago, following a helpful prompt from Amazon, I began reading The Hunger Games, a "young adult" (read, "for teenagers") fantasy trilogy that I suppose appealed to the only semi-dormant sci-fi passions of my youth. Only after availing myself of Amazon's all-too-easy "one click" purchase protocol did I discover that I wasn't alone -- not only is the trilogy extremely popular, but its release as a film in March promises to be one of the cinematic events of the year.

Today, the Yahoo! homepage contains a prominant link to one of several YouTube trailers for the movie -- a link presented not as advertisement, but as "news."

So be it. I'll mingle with the masses, or at least the younger contingent of the masses. I was up late last night, my eyes glued to my Kindle, and am now 70 percent of my way through Catching Fire, the second of the three books.

The story, for those of you who, like me a week ago, haven't a clue, takes place in a post-apocalyptic future. All the wealth now belongs to the citizens of the "Capitol," an affluent and technologically advanced city apparently located somewhere near present day Denver. Today's U.S. has been divided into twelve impoverished districts, each ruled with an iron hand by the wealthy Capitol, each responsible for producing raw materials and goods for the Capitol citizenry. (See any political allegories, students?)

To demonstrate its absolute control, and to punish the citizens for a failed revolt 75 years earlier, each district is required annually to furnish a boy and a girl, selected by lottery, to take part in the Hunger Games -- a no-holds-barred combination of survival game and deadly combat, fought out in a huge wilderness "Arena", until only one out of the 24 kids is left alive. The games are unscripted but fully televised, in a manner well known to followers of our own "reality" shows.

The author is Suzanne Collins -- atypically for such dystopian fantasies, a woman -- and the story is told from the point of view of Katniss, a tough-minded girl of 16. The story is, as you'd expect, full of struggle, killings, anguish, torture, and physical hardship. But -- and I try not to think in stereotypes -- the story seems to reveal the gender of both the author and her protagonist by simultaneously focusing on Katniss's complex and ever-changing relationships (friends? enemies? rivals? lovers?) with two boys, one of whom is a childhood friend back home and the other, her fellow representative from District 12.

The books also seem to focus at times to a weird degree on fashion, cosmetics, and food preparation. This focus could be another indication of femininity, but more likely is simply a device to contrast the effete superficiality of the "One Percent" (my term) who live frivolous, meaningless lives in the Capitol with the tough, quick minds and even tougher bodies of the youngsters from the districts, kids who have grown up familiar with hunger, poverty, and hardship, but have also learned to adapt and think quickly.

The games are played against long-smoldering opposition to the Capitol by the oppressed masses. Katniss's television persona appears both a precipitating factor pushing the districts to active revolt, and a beacon of hope for the rebels.

Having sneaked a look at Amazon reviews for the third book, Mockingjay, I realize that some weird things are waiting in my reading future. Roughly half of the readers appear anguished at the way the plot develops in the final book, and with the unhappy resolution for Katniss and all the people for whom readers had grown attached.

The other half of the reviewers essentially say, "That's life and that's war, toots. Learn to live with it." They loved the ending.

So, my attention will be absorbed a few more days while Katniss discovers and faces her Fate. Then my blog can return to its usual urbane fascination with post-modernist deconstruction of Elizabethan drama.

Liberal education

2012-01-28T12:59:00.000-08:00

"From our perspective, liberal education is not some roster of required courses to round out the major, but the totality of our students' education," he said. "It encompasses all four years and embraces not only curricula – breadth requirements and courses in the major – but also dorm life, overseas studies, community-based service, and student experiences in laboratories, on athletic fields, in internships and in student groups – all of the places where our students learn and grow."

--Quoting Prof. James T. Campbell (committee co-chairman)

It's a cliché, but young people are the future of our country. The corollary: Their education is one of society's most critical responsibilities.

Therefore, I've been interested enough to at least skim through the 100-page printed report that Stanford released on Thursday, a report analyzing the future of undergraduate education at that school. The report reviews the history of similar past studies and the results of their implementation, and sets forth guidelines for the future.

Stanford has had its share of curriculum battles in the past. The report notes that fact, and attempts to skirt some of those minefields by identifying abilities, and only to a lesser extent the substantitive knowledge, that it believes all college graduates should possess.

Foremost is the ability to communicate effectively -- writing clearly, reading closely and critically, speaking effectively, and listening attentively to the opinions of others, especially when those opinions challenge the student's own most closely held beliefs.

Other abilities listed are critical thinking, aesthetic and interpretive judgment, formal and quantitative reasoning, ability to think historically, facility with scientific analysis, and a "rich capacity for creative expression," in whatever field the student is working.

Stating these goals is easy; how they might be implemented occupies the bulk of the report. The report acknowledges the apparent tug of war between specialization in a major and the breadth of learning required by a liberal education. The writers feel that, rightly conceived, the tug of war is illusory: each complements and strengthens the other.

Most interesting, from my perspective, is the emphasis that the report gives to education beyond the classroom -- in student residences, on overseas campuses, and through engagement in off-campus learning experiences (internships, field studies, performing arts, and, especially, community service programs).

At Stanford, as at many other residential schools located outside of large cities, 98 percent of the undergraduates live in university housing. Life in dormitories provides strong opportunities -- not always fully realized -- to encourage learning in various ways apart from the formal curriculum. When I was an undergraduate, I developed many of my own lasting interests simply from unstructured interactions with other students in my housing unit. But the report goes beyond these serendipitous opportunities, suggesting introduction of additional resident faculty members to live and dine with the students in their living groups, and greatly increased use of "integrated learning environments" where students with similar academic interests are clustered in the same unit for a year.

Living in dorms, students grapple intimately with the meanings of citizenship, leadership, diversity, respect, tolerance, and community, developing capacities that are not only intellectual but also social and emotional. The goal of residential education is not to “academicize” these experiences, but to create opportunities for students to connect their curricular and residential lives, in ways that enrich both.

Every university does studies of this sort periodically. The goals are never perfectly realized. But it's important that faculty and administrators sit down occasionally and ask "what is it we're hoping to accomplish, and what tools do we have to improve out performance." This report seems well thought out -- both in terms of educational objectives and in the means it suggests for accomplishing those objectives.

The Stanford report is of value not only to students and faculty at that school, but also to us, the general public. Reading it reminds me of the importance of education; of the excitement that the availability of appropriate educational tools helps generate in both students and faculty; and, simply, how much fun, as well as hard work, the pursuit of learning -- structured and not so structured -- can be.

And ... let's face it. Reading this report also makes me wish I could go back and do it all over again -- all the anxieties and uncertainties, the deadlines, the term papers and final exams -- and the living from day to day on excessive levels of caffeine -- notwithstanding.

A dervish in Milwaukee

2012-01-23T10:12:00.001-08:00

And Allah said: I am with the ones
whose hearts are torn.
--Hadith Qudsi

The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
--F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ayad Akhtar's novel, American Dervish, begins with a prologue: Hayat, a Pakistani-American college student, is eating his first pork at a basketball game and exulting over his new freedom from the claims of religious faith. The novel then flashes back to Hayat's boyhood, his memories as a 12-year-old, living with his immigrant, but well-off, family in suburban Milwaukee.

I began reading with the expectation that Akhtar was about to give us a Muslim counterpart to Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And, indeed, like Joyce's autobiographical novel, American Dervish is a story of an adolescent boy who, after a period of being deeply devout, becomes disillusioned with his faith. Also, like Joyce, Akhtar reveals the beauty and wisdom of that faith, as perceived by the youth, as well as how religious belief can be used to narrow rather than open the mind of a sensitive and intelligent child.

But where Portrait of the Artist is almost solipsistic in the narrator's focus upon himself, American Dervish's primary focus returns repeatedly to an older woman: Mina, the best friend of Hayat's mother, whom the boy calls his aunt.

Hayat's family does not fit easily into the local Pakistani community. His father is a physician, an unbeliever, and an irritable but loving father. His mother has little interest in religion as such, but clings to the traditions of Islam out of homesickness for the Pakistani Punjab. Hayat himself is a quiet boy, but initially seems totally American -- Midwestern and suburban in his life and interests.

But then, when he is 12, Aunt Mina, a strikingly beautiful woman escaping an abusive arranged marriage, arrives from Pakistan to live with Hayat's family. Mina reveals to Hayat the beauties of Islam, teaches him to pray, teaches him to memorize the Quran. Without understanding his own feelings, Hayat falls in love. Romantic love for an "aunt" clearly being impossible, he instead throws himself into her love of Islam. He abandons former pasttimes, spending all his free time memorizing verses.

"Almighty God," Muhammad said, "let me see you."
And all at once, he saw nothing but the Lord. He looked to the right and saw nothing but the Lord. He looked to the left and saw nothing but the Lord, and to the front, and the back, and above...and everywhere he looked, he saw nothing but the Lord. What the Lord looked like Muhammad would never say, other than that His beauty was so great he would have preferred to stand there gazing at Him forever.

But Mina is unlike other members of the local Pakistani community, Muslims whom Hayat's father contemptuously describes as "sheep." She is intelligent, cosmopolitan, and delights in the freedom of American society. She contantly reminds Hayat that forms of worship aren't important to God, what's important are the intentions of his heart. Memorization of the Quran -- which he's told would guarantee his parents' admission to Heaven -- is worthless if he doesn't understand what he is memorizing. Mina is greatly influenced by the Sufi dervishes, mystics whose orthodoxy conservative Muslims have always considered suspect, holy men who seek to surrender everything that might separate them from God's love.

What the dervish found was true humility. He realized that he was no better, no worse than the ground itself, the ground that takes the discarded orange peels of the world. In fact, he realized he was the same as that ground, the same as those peels, as those men, as everything else. He was the same as everything created by Allah's hand. ... He and Allah, and everything Allah created, it was all One.

Much of the novel's plot describes how Hayat, in his frantic possessive love for Mina, sabotages her engagement with Nathan, a Jewish doctor and his father's partner, forcing her unexpectedly into a marriage with a more "suitable" local Pakistani -- a man so insecure that he spends his life locking her away from all other people and physically abusing her.

Mina dies of cancer, after years of abuse, a woman crushed in both mind and body by events she could not control -- and events for which Hayat feels intense guilt. Shortly before Mina's death, Hayat visits her in the hospital -- where he finds her delighting in the Scott Fitzgerald quotation she'd found in his published letters -- and confesses how he ruined her life. She told him it was God's will:

Faith has never been about an afterlife for me, Hayat. It's about finding God now. In the everyday. Here. With you. Whether I'm living in a prison or in a castle. Sick or healthy. It's all the same. That's what the Sufis teach. ... Every single life, no matter how big or small, how happy or how sad, it can be a path to Him.

Hayat can't agree, can't understand the hold Sufi thought has always had on her. She replies that her pain is how God speaks through her.

"[E]verything, everything, is an expression of Allah's will. It is all His glory. Even the pain ..." She paused. "That is the real truth about life."

In an Epilogue, Hayat, years later and now a college graduate working in Boston as an intern for the Atlantic, runs into Nathan in Harvard Square. The doctor had stayed in touch by mail with Mina, clandestinely, and knew her story. He brushes off Hayat's attempts at apology, kindly, and essentially gives him the forgiveness that he needs.

Hayat walks away from that encounter, strolling along the Charles river, feeling alive and filled with an odd gratitude. He remembers, for the first time in ten years, verses from the Quran he had memorized back when he was a devout boy of 12:

Truly with hardship comes ease.
With hardship comes ease!
And so when you are finished, do not rest,
But return to your Lord with love...

Struggles in Ireland

2012-01-18T11:24:00.000-08:00

Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother's womb
A fanatic heart.
--W. B. Yeats

Today, Seattle is immobilized by one of our rare great snowfalls. But last night, the sidewalks were still clear enough for me to walk 1½ miles to the UW campus to attend the first of a three part lecture series entitled "Revenge and Reconciliation in Modern Ireland." The cold and snow outside the hall served as an appropriate metaphor for the hunger and bleakness of so much of Irish history.

The lecturer, Prof. George K. Behlmer of the University history department, discussed in a fast-paced two hours the period from the Rebellion of 1789 up to the end of the nineteenth century. He argued that nothing inherent in the Irish character predisposes them to violence, and that the Irish have suffered from a poor image -- both as harbored within themselves and as revealed to the world at large -- an image of self-loathing, tendency to violence, and adherence to an improbable national mythology, an image that is, to a large degree, one of its own creation. Ireland's greatest writers, such as Yeats and Joyce, have, in their writings, certainly contributed to this image.

Dr. Behlmer discussed specifically the short lives and careers of three Irish revolutionaries -- all, interestingly, themselves Protestant -- Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-98), Thomas Davis (1814-45), and Charles Parnell (1846-91), and how each had attempted to develop a sense of Irish identity apart from Britain, and to secure independence or -- at least in Parnell's case -- home rule for Ireland.

The speaker also discussed Ireland's greatest socio-economic crisis of the nineteenth century, the so-called Potato Famine of 1845-50. Ireland, already overpopulated relative to its resources, lost 5/8 of its population to starvation, disease, and emigration. But Behlmer -- though challenged by audience members following the lecture -- disagreed with Irish contentions that Britain's response to the famine -- a natural disaster resulting directly from rapid spread of a potato plant blight -- constituted "genocide."

Britain's prime minister in 1845, Sir Robert Peel, made attempts to alleviate starvation in Ireland, which included forcing through Parliament the bitterly resisted repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws. Despite Peel's efforts (which contributed to the fall of his government), Behlmer suggested that the overall climate of the times was opposed to any intervention in the economic realm that might have alleviated Irish suffering more directly -- an early display of "libertarian" philosophy, I suppose. Beginning in 1846, under the Whig ministry that followed the fall of the Peel government, the Irish were left to the mercies of the laws of supply and demand.

If genocide denotes the deliberate killing of a national group, then the British were not guilty of genocide; the sentiment in Parliament at the time was simply to allow the natural laws of economics to work themselves out. Which reminds us of the "modernization" of the ten commandments by Arthur Hugh Clough:

Thou shalt not kill; but need'st not strive
Officiously to keep alive ...

Professor Behlmer's first lecture brought to life the brutal hardships and suffering -- the results of both natural causes and British rule -- from which Ireland suffered in the nineteenth century. Whether these hardships affected the way that Irish children were reared -- making the Irish inclined to violence from early childhood, bearing within themselves Yeats's "fanatic heart" -- remains, for me at least, a question for further exploration in the succeeding two lectures.

Triumph for Robert Bruce?

2012-01-14T13:43:00.000-08:00

You can't hike through Scotland, I discovered last summer, without learning to love the Scots. But I do have to admit that, for the casual two-week hiker like myself, it's difficult to distinguish the Scots from the English. Aside from the fact that the Scots speak English that's easier to understand than that spoken by the English themselves. (The Gaelic? Um, let's not talk about that.)

All the more reason to be mildly suprised that the Scottish independence movement seems to be moving ahead full steam. A referendum on independence will be held in 2014, although there's a bit of a tussle as to whether the referendum will be drafted and scheduled by the British government in London, or by the Scottish "devolved" government in Edinburgh.

Why independence? Various economic and cultural rationales are put forth, but the real reason seems to be that the Scots have never got over the sense of being oppressed by the English, both before and after the two kingdoms were united in 1707. (James VI of Scotland had ruled that country for 36 years before also becoming James I of England in 1606, but the two nations weren't formally united for another century.¹) Little incidents like the Massacre of Glencoe, discussed with such relish in this blog last summer, seem to have left a bad taste in a sizable number of contemporary Scottish mouths.

"I'd have a brick wall across the border," the Associated Press reported a Scots woman as exclaiming. At least it's a shorter border than that running from Tijuana to the Rio Grande.

Europe's a funny place. Wonderful, but funny. The trend since World War II has been clearly centripetal -- from the European Coal and Steel Community of the 1940's, to the six-nation European Economic Community in 1958, to the ever-growing and ever more centralized European Community of today -- reinforced by the Schengen agreement, eliminating passport controls between signatory nations, and the Euro zone, adopting the euro as a common currency.

The independence and borders of individual nations in Europe seem increasingly irrelevant, at least to the outsider. But national sensitivities obviously still set emotional chords vibrating within various European countries. Scotland seeks independence from England. The Flemish and Walloons hardly speak to each other, leaving the future of Belgium in doubt. The Basques want to break away from Spain, and the Catalans are, at minimum, a bit touchy. North and south Italy are virtually two different states already. Greece won't even allow the Macedonians to call themselves Macedonians. And Kosovo? Let's not go there.

As the government in Brussels becomes ever more powerful -- which it will, despite current economic problems -- I suppose it's become safer for the constitutent countries to indulge themselves by working out some of their old disputes under the EC umbrella. If it were still every European nation for itself, with a credible external threat from, say, Russia, or from a newly aggressive Germany, Scotland might not be quite so eager to shed its partnership in the United Kingdom.

Separatism in Europe reinspires my own dreams for that long mooted breakaway nation of Cascadia -- a federal union of Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. It will never happen, of course. The world would not tolerate a single country's existing with such a monopoly of rational, liberal thought and politics; extraordinary natural beauty; economic self-suffiency; superlative education and literacy; and widespread human warmth and friendliness among its citizens. Such a star -- a supernova, really -- would so dazzle the eye as to render all other stars in the firmament next to invisible.

The world couldn't handle it. Meanwhile, however, best wishes to our friends in Scotland and England. We love both your countries, jointly and severally, and hope everything works out amicably between you.
--------------------------------

¹Under the independence proposal being discussed, Scotland would return to its status pre-1707, but post-1606. Elizabeth II would remain queen and head of state, as she is also for Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Crippling the leader

2012-01-13T12:39:00.000-08:00

South Carolina has picked the Republican nominee in every primary since the Reagan era began in 1980. It will do so again this year. So we were told by the chairman of the UW Communications (journalism) Department on Wednesday night, in the first of a series of five lectures analyzing the 2012 election campaign.

If so, Mitt Romney's looking good. As of now, at least, he seems to be the obvious front-runner in South Carolina. He also appears to be the best hope for the Republicans in the general election -- a conservative who doesn't make the hair of 70 percent of the voters stand on end, one who can perhaps beguile many moderates and independents into casting their votes for him.

The wild card in South Carolina, however, is a specter from past electoral wars - Newt Gingrich. With millions of dollars in a Super PAC fund, Newt has launched a $3.5 million advertising campaign designed specifically to destroy Romney's viability as a candidate.

By all accounts, the television advertising is devastatingly negative. As Krystal Ball [sic] writes on The Atlantic's website:

Newt hopes to scream at the general election voter that Mitt is such an unbelievably heartless, cold, greedy person that the party that calls ketchup a vegetable and wants to throw people off unemployment during the worst recession since the Great Depression finds him heartless.

Ball labels this advertising barrage as "The Newtron Bomb." She suggests that only Newt Gingrich could get away with such vilification -- any Democrat who made the same arguments would be pilloried as vicious, unfair, and mean-spirited.

Newt's advertising is designed to persuade South Carolina voters that Mitt would be unelectable if nominated; in the process, he may in fact be making him exactly that. Why would Newt -- whose hopes for the nomination must seem remote, even to himself -- do everything possible to cripple the party's front runner? Ball has an answer to that question as well -- Newt's motive is not the good of the country or the success of the Republican party. His motive is, simply, personal revenge.

Early on, Gingrich asked Romney to agree to a campaign free of negative ads. Romney declined. Gingrich got burned by Romney's negative advertising. Gingrich's hostility is now implacable.

A Gingrich TV commercial made available today ties Romney to other Massachusetts public figures -- ones presumably not popular in the Palmetto State. Most devastating of all, the commercial shows clips of both former Democratic candidate John Kerry and Mitt Romney speaking in French. The voice over: "And just like John Kerry -- he speaks French, too." How elitest can a candidate get? How appalling is fluency in French by a presidential candidate in this year of Republican populism?

As a Democratic partisan, I have to admit to a certain pleasure in watching the opposition tear itself apart for as long as possible, and especially in watching Republican attempts to destroy their most potentially successful nominee. On the other hand, it's frightening to watch one of our two major parties systematically eliminate every presidential candidate with any sense of moderation, sophistication, and complexity of thought. After all, the Republicans might always win, even with a pathetic candidate, if the economy stays bad. The normal tendency of the American voter is to blame discontent with the nation's direction on whichever party happens to occupy the White House.

Thus Nixon won in 1968, in voter reaction to the "hippie movement" and anti-war demonstrations. And we all know how that turned out.

"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose," as Newt Gingrich would never say. Let's hope history does not repeat itself -- not this time.

Indiana boy

2012-01-11T10:26:00.000-08:00

Back in 1995, while browsing through magazines at Barnes & Noble, my eye was caught by a magazine I'd never seen before called Strings. On the cover was what appeared to be a teenaged violinist. Not only the cover article (actually, a lengthy, in-depth interview), but the entire magazine looked interesting, and so I bought a copy. Which I still own.

The violinist was not a teenager, however. He was a young man of 27 by the name of Joshua Bell. Today, Bell is perhaps the best known violinist in the United States, if not the world. Last night, I heard him in concert for the second time in my life, this time playing the Bruch Violin Concerto with the Seattle Symphony.

The Strings article noted:

The identifying traits of Bell's playing are a honeyed yet not overly viscous tone, uncompromising beauty of sound without a favoring of tone quality over musical rhetoric, a keen attention to local detail within a firm sense of overall musical architecture ...

I'm no music critic, obviously, but insofar as I can judge, these remain his characterists today, and were well displayed in his performance of the lush, hyper-Romantic Bruch concerto.

In his Strings interview, Bell sounded American in a way that no performer born in Europe could ever sound. He grew up a Hoosier, the son of an Indiana University professor. He was a fan of tennis and basketball. He rambled on for a paragraph, extolling the joys of golf, which he claimed was "really more than a sport -- it's almost Zenlike, the focus in every shot." And he proudly admitted to ranking fourth in the nation in a computer pinball simulation called Crystal Caliburn. He said he was eager to beat the No. 1 score "which is by some guy from Eugene, Oregon."

Last night, Bell walked onto the stage, dressed informally in black, a mop of dark hair falling down his forehead, and greeted the audience with a seemingly shy smirk. He was called back by thunderous applause for approximately seven bows before finally returning with his violin to play a solo encore. I didn't catch the name of the encore selection, but it was a short piece, well post-Romantic, that revealed the many sounds that Bell can generate from a violin -- and the speedy tempo at which he is capable of bowing.

Joshua Bell is now 44. He's the father of a four-year-old son, but still looks like a kid from Indiana himself. His name is known to anyone with the slightest interest in symphonic music.¹ Since 1995, I've collected most of the CD's featuring his playing, including all of the major violin concertos. Despite obvious sophistication, he still looks like a guy who, when he gets the time, shoots a few hoops and challenges a few unsuspecting victims to on-line pinball. And probably lets out a whoop when he wins.

One post a year about a concert is probably all most readers can tolerate. My apologies for two of them in one week, but last night's concert was an exceptional event.
--------------------------

¹But in a famous experiment in 2007, he spent 45 minutes playing six Bach pieces unannounced in the Washington, D.C., subway. Video cameras caught 1,097 riders walking past him. Seven stopped to listen, and only one recognized him. He collected a total of $32.17 from 27 passers-by. Two days earlier, concert-goers had spent an average of $100 each to hear him play in a sold-out Boston concert.

Peeping early from its bower

2012-01-09T16:25:00.000-08:00

Thy smiles I note, sweet early Flower,
That peeping from thy rustic bower
The festive news to earth dost bring,
A fragrant messenger of Spring.
--Coleridge, "To a Primrose"

"Sweet early flower," indeed. The primrose each year is one of the earliest of blooms. Its English name itself means "first rose." (Its Latin name, less poetically, is Primula vulgaris.)

A few primroses dwell in my front yard, resident there since time immemorial. They make their usual appearance in early to mid February, providing me the first reassurance that winter lasts not forever -- that the sun already hasteneth his way northwards. That Spring is on her way.

Today is only January 9, and yet my young primroses already are in bloom. Three flowers fully open: deep purple with yellow centers. Three more peeping forth as purple buds, flowers inchoate. Mine are Primula vulgaris sibthorpii (native to the Balkans and southwest Asia), distinguished by their purple color from the yellow and, well, more vulgar Primula vulgaris vulgaris (native to western and southern Europe). Like Iowa and New Hampshire Republicans, in 2012 my primroses seem to have tripped all over themselves, in their impatient eagerness to rush the season.

Why so early? Mildness of weather? We haven't had many sub-freezing temperatures this year, but the weather's been otherwise -- as usual -- cold and wet. Have my primroses been prematurely aroused by the strength of the political winds? Or are my plants eager to stage one final show for my benefit, saddened with foreknowledge that this coming December brings to an end the Mayan world cycle?

Who knows what's in their pretty little heads? But their arrival is welcome. And if their arrival should augur an early end to winter, I'm all for it. I'm all for it, even should their appearance -- like melting glaciers and overheated polar bears -- be but additional evidence of global warming, that bête noir of my political adversaries.

The primrose was Prime Minister Disraeli's favorite flower. It is the county flower of Devon. It is edible. Its leaves can be used to make tea, and its flowers to make primrose wine. It's a loveable flower, and I do love it. I greet with warmth its early appearance.

Welcome again for yet another year, O Primula vulgaris . Bring us peace in our time, an early spring, and a Happy New Year.

Music from Trinity

2012-01-08T15:15:00.000-08:00

I'd never heard of John Adams. No, not the president from Quincy, Massachusetts. I'm talking about the composer from Worcester, Massachusetts.

At least, I didn't think I'd ever heard of him until last night, but now I see that he's famous for his 1987 opera Nixon in China, which I guess I have heard of at one time or another. But certainly never seen.

Anyway, last night the Seattle Symphony concluded the evening's program with the Doctor Atomic Symphony, orchestral music adapted from John Adams's 2005 opera, Doctor Atomic. The program notes admonish me that Adams is "widely recognized as the pre-eminent American composer of his generation." So, there you are, my own ignorance notwithstanding.

Despite the extreme conservatism of my musical tastes, I found the symphony -- maybe more a tone poem than a symphony: a single movement, 23 minutes in length -- to be dramatic and gripping and worth my attention. The score was loud and dissonant and heavy on the percussion, as one would expect from a modern work, but also rich in melody in the woodwinds and brass. The conductor -- a visiting conductor from the St. Louis Symphony -- gave us a short and witty pre-performance synopsis of the opera's plot, and explained how the symphony tracks that plot and introduces the major musical themes of the opera.

The opera takes place in 1945 -- the first act occuring shortly before the testing of the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, N.M., and the second act immediately before detonation of the Hiroshima bomb. The focus is on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the "father" of the atomic bomb, whose ambivalence about what he was creating -- and later, what he had created -- eventually led to the government's yanking of his security clearance.

Oppenheimer was a poet as well as a theoretical physicist. It was he who famously recalled his feelings while observing the initial bomb test in New Mexico with a line from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." He gave the code name of "Trinity" to the Alamogordo test site, after his favorite sonnet by John Donne: "Batter my heart, three-person'd God."

Oppenheimer, the "Dr. Atomic" of the opera's title, has always fascinated and impressed me. At one time, back when I had personal heroes, I guess I considered him as such.

The symphonic derivative of the opera that we heard last night combined breathtaking musical elements of fear, anticipation, and explosive violence, with an overall sense of poetry and awe. It was not "easy listening," compared with the Mozart piano concerto that had immediately preceded it, but it was moving and thought-provoking.

If the opportunity ever presents itself, I might actually persuade myself to attend John Adams's opera itself -- just out of curiosity and, perhaps, as my own personal tribute to the life of Dr. Oppenheimer.

Didion at 75

2012-01-05T20:11:00.001-08:00

The first time I read an essay by Joan Didion, one published in a weekly magazine, I was dazzled. In a few paragraphs, she said everything I had been feeling about generational differences (in her case, between "silent" and "hippie" generations) in how people dealt with life and with politics. She threw in thoughts about growing older, and about whether it was possible, or even worthwhile, for groups of citizens to effect societal change through angry demonstrations.

I later read more of her writing, and was especially impressed by her two early books of essays, books about which it has been written:

Her books of essays -- Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album -- represent, to me at least, some of the best and most evocative writing of its kind of the past half century.

--Me, actually, in my 2009 posting "Slouching towards darkness".

(In that 2009 post, I reviewed a dramatization of Didion's book, The Year of Magical Thinking.)

Imagine my discomfort today, therefore, when I read Caitlin Flanagan's essay, "The Autumn of Joan Didion," in the February issue of The Atlantic. Flanagan's essay, which purports to review Didion's latest book, Blue Nights, proclaims that Didion is a writer for girls, especially young girls "on the cusp of womanhood." Flanagan herself recalls -- and much of the review is devoted to Flanagan's memories of her own childhood at Berkeley, where her father, as an English professor, gave Flanagan the chance to meet the young Didion -- how her father exclaimed one night, "There's something weird going on with Joan Didion and women."

So ... what? So, I've been in love with chick lit all these years? But I don't watch vampire movies. While Jane Austen's ok, I don't moon over it. I don't grow faint reading of tender virgins finding themselves clasped in the strong arms of a manly embrace. Why Didion?

Flanagan points out that no real gal can resist Didion's allusions to "the smell of jasmine," or the "packing list" Didion allegedly kept by her suitcase. Huh? Didion, Flanagan contends, knows how to describe her own wardrobe and that of others in detail. She knows the differences in styles of flatware. She knows about good and bad floor plans for houses. She [gasp!] writes about hanging "yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better."

Us guys, on the other hand, we don't care about all that stuff. We want to read about getting high with Hunter Thompson, while speeding on a highway somewhere out of Barstow. Says Flanagan.

Flanagan -- and maybe millions of women, as she suggests -- apparently read Didion differently from the way I do. I'm sure the yellow silk, the flatware, the crepe-de-chine wraps, and [sigh] the jasmine are all there in Didion's writing. I'm willing to admit that her attention to such feminine details may be an attractive feature to many. But to me, the essence of Didion's appeal -- in her essays, which are the concern of both Flanagan and myself -- has been her ability to see the world from a different angle: to see the normal, routine world with which we are all familiar through a broken or distorting mirror, revealing a scary image of things flying out of control.

The title to her first book of essays, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, calls to mind words from Yeats's poem that seem to inform all of her essays.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, ...

Didion's essays repeatedly show worlds spinning apart -- her personal grip on her own life, and our civilization's grip on civilization.

As an example of Didion's acute sensitivity to female concerns(according to Flanagan) -- Didion understood that the traditional governor's mansion in Sacramento was superior to Ronald Reagan's new mansion "because it had big, airy bedrooms" in which one could spend time reading, or writing, or "closing the door and crying until dinner." No wonder girls loved Didion! But that 1977 essay was only superficially about the livability of the Reagan mansion. She saw the Reagans and their nouveau mansion as representing an unfortunate, and already passé, 1950s-ish interlude between two eras -- the old rural Californa of orange groves and quiet good taste and a coming post-70's California of austerity and simplicity, represented by the then governor, Jerry Brown. Brown was famous for his monastic lifestyle, for sleeping on a futon on the floor of his apartment, for refusing to live in the Reagans' overbuilt governor's mansion.

One hears every possible reason for not living in the house except the one that counts: it is the kind of house that has a wet bar in the living room. It is the kind of house that has a refreshment center. It is the kind of house in which one does not live, but there is no way to say this without getting into touchy and evanescent and finally inadmissible questions of taste, and ultimately of class. I have seldom seen a house so evocative of the unspeakable.

--Didion, The White Album.

Ultimately, after talking about her own childhood and Didion's appeal to the female gender, Flanagan's review gets around to its nominal subject, Blue Nights. She regrets that it is not a good book. The language is clichéd, Didion's thoughts are no longer original, her insight is lacking. In summary, Didion's problem is that, at 75, "she got old."

Blue Nights deals with Didion's parallel concerns: the death of her daughter, and her own aging and eventual death. As would any grieving mother, she lingers repeatedly over memories of her daughter throughout the young woman's short life: happy times, sad times, puzzling times, disheartening times. To Flanagan, it's clear that Didion just can't read between the lines. Didion can't see that many of her daughter's problems resulted from the way her parents reared her, from their overriding concerns with their own careers, from their selfish narcissism.

My freshman English teacher wrote a warning on one of my early essays: Be cautious in believing that you understand an author's writing better than he does himself. To me, reading Blue Nights before I read Flanagan's review, it was clear that Didion was all too aware of how her own "weaknesses" as a parent affected her daughter. These weaknesses, many of which were unavoidable considering the careers pursued by Didion and her husband, are set forth clearly in the book, and her "where did I go wrong" questions are rhetorical. Didion did not do a clinical self-analysis, it's true; she left it to the reader to connect the dots. But Joan Didion, whatever her age, is never clueless.

Rearing a child, watching the child grow into independence, growing older oneself, losing one's loved ones, and facing one's own eventual death are all part of the human predicament. They are neither male nor female concerns alone. Joan Didion has been thinking and writing of these problems, among many others, throughout her writing career. Her writing may have had a special appeal for young girls, but she's never been a "women's writer." She may now be aging, but she has not lost her sharpness of thought, her turn of phrase, or her ability to see the "strange" in what others find commonplace.

Blue Nights is worth reading.

Dealing with abstractions

2012-01-03T14:18:00.000-08:00

Last night was a bad night in the Rainier96 household. It started out nicely enough, watching a bowl game that was being played well by both sides. It ended, however, in tears. And in screams, thrown objects, and bewildered cats scrambling for cover.

My team lost, of course. Lost by a missed field goal, a seemingly easy kick by a seemingly competent (albeit freshman) kicker, with two seconds left on the clock.

A good night's sleep, followed by a vigorous piano lesson this morning, restored my will to live. But my volcanically emotional reaction interests me. Why did I care so much? I don't know anyone currently in school at Stanford, my alma mater. And I certainly don't know anyone at Oklahoma State.

And yet, for an hour or so, I felt devastated, as though my own personal worth had been cheapened, my character attacked, my entire way of life insulted. I found myself hating the entire state of Oklahoma and all its inhabitants -- even though a quick glance at the faces of the school's players and student body made it obvious that they were every bit as wholesome, exuberant, playful, and good-natured as their opposites from my own school -- or rather as their opposites from my school had been, up until two seconds before the end of regulation play.

Competitive sports everywhere is based on the fans' willingness and ability to identify with an entity -- a school, a club, a professional team. Thus, I "love" the Seahawks; I "hate" U.S.C. But "Seahawks" and "Trojans" are just abstract entities. The players on those teams and their coaches, change constantly. The U.S.C. of today is composed of an entirely different cast of characters from that of ten years ago. I'm loving or hating a fictitious entity that is incapable of loving or hating me in return.

Sports fans are merely a less virulent version of a nation's "true patriots." When an American says (as they often do) that he despises Iran (or France), it's difficult logically to understand what he means. He may, of course, simply mean that he strongly disagrees with the policies pursued by that nation's government. But when the words "hate" or "despise" are used, the user generally has passed beyond logic. Despite not knowing a single person living in Iran (or France), he sincerely feels hatred and contempt for an entire nation, a nation that has no idea that he even exists. Iranians are "evil and barbaric fanatics." French are "cheese-eating surrender monkeys." These patriots' own America, on the other hand, is "a shining city on a hill," a "beacon of freedom," and an "exception" amongst nations.

My short-lived emotions following the bowl game remind me of a dialogue between two infantrymen that I read in a novel a long time ago. I suspect the book was Remarque's All's Quiet on the Western Front, but I wouldn't bet my life on it. One soldier asks another (all quotes are paraphrases from my memory): "Why are we fighting, anyway?" The other replies that they are fighting because another country had insulted theirs. The first asks in reply, quite sensibly, how one country can possibly "insult" another. "How can we be killing and getting killed for such an "insult"?" he asks. "Do you feel insulted? I certainly don't feel insulted."

Our minds seems hardwired to use such abstractions when we think. But as I watched the faces last night of the winning Oklahoma State players and students, it was obvious that they were no different from players and students at my own school. I obviously didn't hate them, anymore than I actually felt that my own school's victory or defeat would be a personal victory or defeat for myself. It was just a game, as our parents used to remind us.

When I visited Iran last spring, I looked at the faces of the Iranian people, the Iranian children. In all but superficial respects they seemed pretty much like Americans. However irresponsible their government's conduct might have seemed to me, I didn't "hate" the Iranian people, or wish them harm. And I feel no desire now to "punish" them by backing sanctions that would cause more harm to them in their daily lives than could be justified by any effect the sanctions might have in persuading the Iranian government to modify its policies. Nor, more profoundly, can I support an actual attack on them by our government's military forces. I certainly won't support "bombing them back to the stone age."

Foreign affairs is not "just a game." Affairs between nations affect real people, people who rarely have much control over those affairs. I take the conduct of foreign policy seriously. But I won't "hate" people in other countries, laugh at their customs or religious beliefs, disrespect their natural love for their own country, or remain indifferent to the effects of my own government's conduct upon their lives.

I'd recovered from my temporary insanity by this morning, no harm having been done to anyone, including my cats. Let's hope our government can handle in a rational manner the challenges posed in dealing with Iran, realizing fully and at all times that however much Americans oppose certain policies by the Iranian government, we recognize our brotherhood and common humanity with the people of Iran.

As for Stanford's football team -- well, there's always next year

Driving onwards

2011-12-31T17:10:00.000-08:00

Stuart rose from the ditch, climbed into his car, and started up the road that led toward the north. ... As he peered ahead into the great land that stretched before him, the way seemed long. But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction.
--E. B. White

As we arise from the muddy ditch that was 2011, may the skies that lie ahead in 2012 shine brightly about us. May we find ourselves headed in the right direction, whatever that right direction might be and wherever it may lead us.

Happy New Year!

Suffer the little children ...

2011-12-30T13:51:00.000-08:00

Two New York Times stories out of Illinois, this week.

The first story is that of Lamar West. Lamar was taken from his birth parents, for reasons related to drug abuse, when he was four. He was adopted by Frankie Lee West when he was five. His birth records were changed to show his adoption. His surname was changed to that of his adoptive mother. He became part of a large family, some adopted and some the natural children of his new mother.

From what I can glean from the story, he lived a normal childhood. At age 17, he moved out of the house for a few months, because of over-crowding, but kept in regular contact with his mom. He then returned to his house. It was empty. As Lamar puts it, his mother had "upped and went."

Lamar was abandoned one month before he turned 18. Eighteen is the age when adoptive parents in Illinois stop receiving state assistance. Lamar is now 20. He's had one brief phone call with his mother. She did not invite him back. He has since married and has a child of his own. He still misses the family in which he was raised.

The NYT writer points out that this is a common problem in Illinois. Abandoned children over 18 are adults. The state has no further responsibility for them, financial or otherwise. Many end up on the street, homeless.

"D.C.F.S. is aware that not all placements are perfect matches", the article notes.

The second article, also in the New York Times, reports that the Catholic bishops of Illinois have closed down most of the Catholic Charities affiliates in Illinois. Catholic Charities is one of the largest social service organizations in the nation, providing services to poor persons of all faiths. Sixty percent of its income is from government programs. Three percent comes from diocesan and parish funds. The rest comes from charitable contributions and investments.

Among the services provided by Catholic Charities in Illinois is arrangement of adoptions. Last summer, Illinois's attorney general told the organization that it must henceforth comply with the state's anti-discrimination laws. Therefore, in determinating suitability of adoptive parents, it could no longer consider whether the parents were of the same or opposite sexes.

Rather than permit Catholic Charities to place children with same-sex parents, the Illinois bishops have shut down the entire organization within Illinois.

The bishops feel their religious freedom is being attacked. "In the name of tolerance, we’re not being tolerated,” said Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of the Diocese of Springfield, Ill.

A teacher from Marion, Ill., Tim Kee, and his long time partner, Rick Wade, both Catholic, tried to adopt through Catholic Charities. They were turned down.

I'm not sure what lesson, if any, can be drawn from considering these two stories together. Certainly, churches should not be forced to act against their principles. But what if the church were one that had religious objections to mixed marriages? How should the state react to a religious organization that refused, on principle, to allow a white male and African-American female (or vice versa), to adopt a child of any race?

Illinois is seeing skyrocketing numbers of "failed adoptions," as kids who were adopted 15 years or so ago are now turning 18. The motive for many of those adoptions, it now seems, was financial. "Not all placements are perfect matches," as the the NYT article summarizes the state's position. At the same time, the state has been providing over sixty percent of the operating budgets of an agency -- unquestionably an excellent and highly responsible provider of services -- that won't permit a school teacher and his long time partner to adopt a child -- for no reason other than that they are not of opposite sexes.

The bishops of Illinois have thus made the decision that it is preferable to allow the state's bureaucratic placement of a child with a single parent whose only motive is to receive state assistance payments -- or to allow the child to grow to maturity living in an orphanage -- rather than itself place the child with two men or women who -- presumably -- would raise the child in a loving and stable environment.

Maybe they are correct. They no doubt are acting in accord with their sincere convictions. But maybe, with a little thought and a little prayer, they could figure out a course of action that considers the immediate impact of their actions upon the lives of others, not merely their actions' conformity with abstract principles.

Knocking off No. 7

2011-12-30T09:30:00.000-08:00

On December 24, the afternoon before Christmas, I was doing last minute shopping at a mini-mall in the town of Big Bear Lake, California. I would have felt less tired -- less stressed, perhaps -- if I'd known what a home town boy from Big Bear Lake was doing at the same moment.

In May 2010, I wrote a post praising the accomplishments of 13-year-old Jordan Romero, the boy who'd just become the youngest person ever to climb Everest. At the age of 10, when he climbed Africa's Kilimanjaro, Jordan decided to climb the highest peak on each of the seven continents. Everest was number six; only Antarctica remained. He hoped to climb the Vinson Massif the following December.

His climb was delayed for a year, but on December 24, 2011, he completed the climb. At the age of 15 years, 5 months and 12 days, he was the youngest person to ever climb the "Seven Summits." According to Wikipedia, China has now joined Nepal in prohibiting climbs of Everest by persons under 16. Jordan's record therefore looks pretty safe for the foreseeable future.

The young man's steadfast determination over the past five years -- not only to complete each grueling climb, but to persist in the training required before and between climbs -- is inspiring. He demonstrates that our frequent stereotype of his age group -- a bunch of lazy kids playing with their electronic toys -- is only a stereotype. Not many young people will accomplish this much, this early -- but many of them are following their own stars, whether athletic, academic, entrepreneurial, with dedication and enthusiasm.

I haven't bothered checking the on-line comments about Jordan's latest achievement by the commentators who I found so irritating in my earlier post, but I assume they're still there, still criticizing and scoffing at anyone who dares to accomplish anything they can't or won't. The ranks of this on-line chorus have been described as bitter young adults, unemployed and wedded to their computers while living in their parents' basement. Another unfair stereotype, probably, but I can live with it.

Again, my congratulations to Jordan Romero, and to his parents who supported him so strongly in his efforts (and to Jordan's father, especially, who joined his son in making each climb).

Christmas chiaroscuro

2011-12-27T19:01:00.000-08:00

Not a crock pot.

At least, I don't think so. The doubt I suggested earlier -- whether my new Kindle would turn out to be one of those gadgets that, once purchased, I would consign to a dark corner of the basement, never to be seen again -- was apparently unfounded.

During my train trip last week -- to Los Angeles, to join family for Christmas -- between my eating in the diner, drinking in the club car, talking to relatives who joined the train mid-journey in the Bay Area, and simply staring out the window and daydreaming -- I managed to read, in its entirety, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer. Once I arrived at our rented cabin at Big Bear Lake -- between my eating incessantly, drinking when not eating, talking to relatives who descended on Big Bear from all over the West Coast, and simply staring out the window at the snow, the trees and the deep blue sky -- I managed to read, in its entirety, Blue Nights, by Joan Didion.

My Kindle proved as helpful and as easy to use as I'd hoped. The two books I chose to read were well-written, fascinating, and possibly worthy of a future blog or two in their own right. Extremely Loud is about death, loss of loved ones, and the inability to know the ones you love even while they still live, told against a backdrop of (to some extent) the firebombing of Dresden and (to a significant extent) the catastrophe of Nine-Eleven in New York City. Blue Nights is about death, loss of loved ones, and the inability to know the ones you love even while they still live, told against a backdrop of the apprehension by its 75-year-old author that she not only was no longer a kid, but was, in fact, showing obvious and disturbing signs of mortality.

Ho ho ho! And a Merry Christmas to you all, boys and girls!

But like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come and the tombstone etched with Ebeneezer's own name, my Kindle reading projected merely a dark background, against which the joyful revels of Christmas were rendered even sharper and more colorful -- a sense of temporality that caused one to welcome even more the warm company of close family, the renewal of acquaintance with distant family, and casual conversations with interesting family friends I'd never before met.

I'd hardly claim as an original observation that awareness of life's shortness often intensifies one's enjoyment of life's presence. Luckily for the progress of mankind, knowledge of our mortality isn't usually a debilitating depressant.

So I had a great time at Big Bear, despite (or because of) writings on my Kindle cautioning me to enjoy the present while it's still here to be enjoyed -- to shoo away the ghosts of the future, and join the guests celebrating at the banquet table of Christmas Present.

I'll have one more plate of turkey, Bob Cratchit, if I might? And God bless us, every one!

South by rail

2011-12-20T14:50:00.000-08:00

Feel the wheels rumblin' 'neath the floor.
And the sons of pullman porters
And the sons of engineers
Ride their father's magic carpets made of steel.¹

Some of my earliest hazy memories are of riding on overnight trains from Portland down the Willamette Valley, to visit my great grandparents on a farm. And slightly later, I have a much clearer recollection of traveling by sleeper with my mother and brother to Sacramento, where an aunt picked us up and drove us up to Donner Lake, near Lake Tahoe.

These early experiences -- memories dimmed by the swirling fogs of very early childhood -- may have exerted a permanent impact on my brain's later development, because I can't remember a time during my life that I haven't loved train travel. As a 14-year-old, I took the Empire Builder back to Chicago -- three days and two nights all by myself, sitting and sleeping in a coach seat -- to visit a former school friend. During college, I made three round trips a year between my home in Washington and school in California. Overseas for my university's "study abroad" program, I traveled all over Europe during school breaks -- always by train.

Nowadays, it's much faster, simpler, and usually cheaper to fly than it is to ride by train. Nevertheless, tomorrow at 9:45 a.m., I'll find myself boarding Amtrak's Coast Starlight, bound for Southern California, where I'll join family for Christmas. I'll arrive at Burbank -- the last stop before Los Angeles -- at 8:15 p.m. Thursday night. No longer a starving, penniless student -- carefully avoiding the expense of European hotels by sitting up overnight in a second class compartment -- I now allow myself the luxury of splurging on a roomette in a sleeping car.

But coach or sleeper, the basic attractions are the same. For 35 hours, I'll be isolated from the "real" world. No chores to do. Nothing expected of me. I can read in comfort for uninterrupted hours, or stare blankly out the window, hypnotized by the blur of scenery rushing past. If I feel restless, I can walk to one of the lounge cars, have a beer, and meet or observe other travelers. If I chose -- which I don't -- I could spend much of the trip staring at screens in a darkened room devoted to arcade games. Some long distance trains -- I'm not sure about the Coast Starlight -- even show movies in a small theater.

The sweet tedium of the day is broken regularly by meals in the diner -- meals that, for sleeping car passengers, are included in the fare. These meals, for the first few years after Amtrak took over from Southern Pacific, were barely edible at best, but they are now surprisingly good. Perhaps not the same haute cuisine that luxury trains like the AT&SF's Super Chief are said to have offered before World War II, during the glory days of train travel, but they're a notch above those offered by casual chain restaurants.

The seats of the roomette convert to a bed with linen, blankets and pillows at night. I find them extremely comfortable, and the rocking and swaying of the railway car conducive to a very relaxing sleep. Of course, I've always slept happily sitting up in coach, as well, so maybe you shouldn't rely on my recommendation!

I've found that mankind can be divided into two groups: those who love train travel, and those who wonder why anyone would waste 35 hours of his life to travel a distance he could reach in a little over two hours by plane. It's these little differences between people that make life interesting, right? Anyway, I'm pleased to fall into the first category.

"Coast Starlight, now boarding on Track Three, bound for Tacoma, Olympia, Centralia, Kelso-Longview, Vancouver, Portland, .... and Los Angeles. All Aboard!"

See you folks after Christmas!
------------------------------------
¹Steve Goodman, "City of New Orleans."

Sail on, Gray Lady, sail on by

2011-12-16T11:18:00.000-08:00

Yahoo News seems to be the first on the internet with the news that Janet Robinson, CEO of the New York Times, is resigning at the end of the month. Her departure is attributed to shareholder discontent with share value, resulting from inadequate revenue from subscriptions and advertising.

I might have used this news as a springboard for discussing the woes that confront print journalism nationwide, as newspapers find themselves faced with ever-increasing competition from free on-line news sites and blogs, at the time of a poor national economy.

Instead, I choose to note the almost universal chortling of joy expressed in anonymous on-line comments to the article, declaring the Gray Lady to be a worthless liberal rag, good only for lining bird cages. The sooner she dies the better.

I have a lifelong friend, a passionate conservative, who proudly declares that he never reads the NYT -- wouldn't allow the filthy propaganda sheet in his house. As a liberal who regularly reads the Fox News website, just to see what arguments are coming from the other side, I find this attitude hard to understand.

Newspapers offer readers a continuum of quality. There are terrible British newspapers -- many of them -- that I'd never bother reading, not so much because I disagree with their editorial policy as because they're full of sensationalistic nonsense. But there are few American papers, at least ones with a national following, that arouse that response in me. Right wing, left wing, or moderate -- most papers try to walk the perilous tightrope of bringing legitimate news to the community while still making a profit for their owners or shareholders.

But they do differ in quality. If an apolitical alien dropped down from Outer Space, and did his best to expunge every iota of bias from Fox News and the New York Times -- an impossible task, apart from the opinion page, since every decision selecting stories for publication rests on the editor's subjective sense of what he considers "important" and "newsworthy" -- the disparity between the two would be obvious and dramatic. Fox News would then be seen as combining many features of USA Today with certain features of People magazine. With even a dash of seasoning, perhaps, from National Enquirer.

The NYT, on the other hand, would still come close to justifying its somewhat overstated claim of being "America's Newspaper of Record." In the Times, you find in-depth reporting of international and national news that you simply can't find elsewhere in a newspaper format. But political news is only a fraction of what you get for your two bucks at the news stand -- over a week's time, you also receive detailed news -- by writers with expertise in their fields -- of music, arts, popular culture, books, fashion, business, sports. If I were totally uninterested in politics and international relations, I'd still subscribe to the NYT for its daily reporting of those other areas of life in which I did have an interest.

I'm not sure, on the other hand, that any of my right wing friends would bother to click on Fox News (or watch it on TV) if it weren't for the political slanting that the site offers.

The New York Times is not going to die, despite the fervent wishes of on-line commentators, any more than the Wall Street Journal will die, despite my own occasional raised eyebrows with respect to its editorial policy. Both newspapers are major assets in the world of American (and world) journalism. We would be a more poorly informed nation without them.

Requiem for a refuge

2011-12-15T14:55:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, George Whitman, 98, died in Paris. The New York Times notes that he had owned his bookstore overlooking the Seine, Shakespeare & Company, since 1951. His store, named Le Mistral until 1964, was a mecca and refuge for the post-World War II generation of American expatriate writers, and the spiritual heir of the original Shakespeare & Company, run by Sylvia Beach during the 1920's.

His death occurred, ironically, on the same date as my post announcing that I had purchased a Kindle.

These two events were on my mind today, as I walked out of Barnes & Noble in University Village. For several months, I'd been noticing that the shelves had grown smaller and smaller, and spaced farther and farther apart. I'd been worrying that B&N was focusing its attention excessively on Nook, its own version of Kindle, rather than on promoting the sale of physical books. Today I learned the worst possible news -- the Village's B&N is closing its doors at the end of this month.

My readers are undoubtedly familiar with Barnes & Noble. The Village store is a massive yet warm and welcoming establishment. Two expansive floors, which, for years, were packed densely with books covering every possible subject matter. Alcoves with easy chairs and library tables -- one of the alcoves upstairs graced with a gas fireplace. A large recordings department, carrying an impressive inventory of classical CDs. Areas where authors were invited to give readings. A mezzanine Starbucks where you could linger over the books you'd just purchased -- or might still decide to purchase.

I often spent an entire afternoon at Barnes & Noble, browsing and reading books (books that I sometimes purchased, although not often enough, it seems), ending my visit by dallying for a half hour over latte, surrounded by poster caricatures of famous authors, while watching customers wander about the first floor below. Students would crowd tables doing homework, researching from books from the store's shelves. No one was hurried or asked to leave. As did Shakespeare & Company itself, the store offered a haven, at least for the day, to anyone with time on his hands and a love of books in his heart. The store's ambience was as much library as bookstore, but a library that was far cozier and less institutional than our downtown public library.

Halcyon bygone days. Wandering about the maze-like stacks of the Village store came close to matching my own personalized image of heaven. One of those joys you never quite appreciate, unfortunately, until you lose it.

Barnes & Noble still has a large store downtown that I often visit. That outlet is a fine place to shop around and buy a book -- but it's crowded with shoppers and it's bustling. Intentionally or not, it doesn't encourage idle shoppers to linger for hours, reading books without necessarily paying for them. It's not "cozy."

With the downtown Borders having shut down earlier this year when its parent company went bankrupt, and with the closing now of the Village B&N, I wonder if it's only a matter of time until all large bookstores shut their doors.

I left the store this afternoon, picturing that moment a couple of weeks from now when the last customer walks out the door, the last latte is pulled, the gas fireplace is extinguished for good, the remaining inventory is boxed up and returned to the publishers. The sky seemed grayer, the drizzle more drizzly, as I walked away.

Is it all Kindle from now on? George Whitman may have sensed that now was a good time to quietly depart the scene.

Kindling my desire

2011-12-14T18:35:00.000-08:00

A month ago, I penned (keyboarded) a hymn to the printed page. Books were my life, I declared piously.

Today, I stand shamefaced before you and announce: "I've bought myself a Kindle."

Why would I do such a thing, you ask. I guess the proximate cause for my downfall was my experience while on trek in October. Pascal, my travel buddy, brought his Kindle in place of the paperbacks he lugged around on past trips. The device was attractive, slim, easy to hold in one hand; its screen was incredibly easy to read. He electronically bookmarked pages he found interesting, and highlighted passages, just like a college student. He instantaneously checked an internal dictionary for words whose meaning escaped him. He announced -- at least daily(!) -- the exact percentage still to go of the book he was reading. Had he needed new reading material, he would have had immediate digital access to Amazon's inventory. He even -- and this is amazing, although of questionable utility -- was able to beckon the book to read aloud to him.

I know. The decadence is breathtaking.

Of course, I had to get one. Whatever longwinded justifications I might offer you now, we all know the real reason. The Kindle was just too cool for me to resist.

I've downloaded one book from Amazon -- it cost me about $10. I've read a few pages, just to savor the experience, but I'm really saving my first "Kindle experience" for a lengthy train trip I'll be taking next week. It's while I travel that I expect Kindle to be so worthwhile and convenient. Here at home, on the other hand, I'm about half way through the new George Kennan biography -- a dense, heavy, hardback volume that I balance precariously and uncomfortably on one knee while my two cats face off for possession of the other.

The Kennan bio is a serious book, and its size and weight confirm its seriousness. It's a satisfying book to pick up and hold with both hands. I find myself constantly turning back to past chapters, confirming my recall of what I'd read earlier. The book, in all its physicality, will be a permanent addition to my library, a valuable resource to which I'll undoubtedly refer in the future.

A landmark biography of a renowned diplomat and framer of foreign policy requires shelf space. It's just not appropriate Kindle fodder.

But I think Kindle will be well adapted to reading fiction. I generally read novels straight though, without doing much searching back to re-read earlier portions. Once I've read a novel, moreover, I generally shelve it, never to be looked at again. I'll be adding fewer new works of fiction to shelves from now on, but I won't miss them.

And, of course -- (did I mention?) -- my totally awesome Kindle can store about 3,000 books: my once-read novels will all be there should I actually ever need them again.

I know it's not obvious, but I'm kind of excited, behind my calm and equable exterior. Kindle will be a new and powerful tool, and a supplement to my library of printed volumes. It unleashes all the dynamism of the future.

Unless, of course, it turns out to be no more than 2011's version of the 1970's crock pot -- an item everyone just had to own -- and one that's been tucked away, unused and out of sight, during the decades since it was purchased.

Tickling the ivories

2011-12-11T20:02:00.000-08:00

As promised in my last posting, I won't describe my own performance at today's piano recital. Except to say that I was able to complete my piece without collapsing or requiring resuscitation.

But the recital experience itself -- my first since I was maybe 12 or 13 -- is worth a brief mention.

Ten pianists besides myself performed. They ranged in age from an unbelievably tiny young man of perhaps three, up to a boy and girl who appeared to be in their early teens. Eight of the performers were of Asian background. I mention this as but one more piece of evidence -- in one more area of life -- that Asian-American kids are positioning themselves to outshine their peers from other ethnic groups in tomorrow's America.

In the audience, besides those of us waiting to perform (or slowly reviving from our completed performance), were parents, siblings, and other proud relatives; our piano teacher herself; and an administrator from the music school who was taking photos of each cute child (and me, I presume) at the piano. In other words, it was a small audience, and not at all intimidating -- parents were all holding their breath through their own offspring's playing, and responding with appreciative applause to the performances of others.

The music ranged from Skateboard Doodle by a little tyke who obviously wished he were elsewhere, to rather sophisticated pieces by Mozart and Shostakovich by the two teenagers. I enjoyed it all: the serious efforts by the smallest kids, the stumblings by a boy about 12 who obviously hadn't practiced and was playing under protest, and the accomplished playing of familiar classical or semi-classical pieces (some in simplified arrangements) by the older half of the cast.

Here we were, two weeks before Christmas, with feverish shopping to be done. NFL games were on TV. It was a cold night, and the church in which the recital took place was also cold. But a little gathering of young people and their moms and dads made room in their lives to celebrate modest musical accomplishments. In a world of electronics and rock and roll and obsession with professional sports, parents implicitly acknowledged that the best gift and best educational experience they could give their kids was to willingly attend, listen to their children and others play, and show appreciation for their efforts by applause and hugs.

For a short time, playing the piano -- an ancient form of mastery that served as a goal for generations of kids before computer games came along -- was the most important fact in the universe.

It was nice.

Before a live audience

2011-11-29T14:40:00.000-08:00

"And now ... Donny, in his second year, will perform Busy Beavers for us! Donny?"

The long, long walk from the front row up onto the stage. The awkward bow -- to an audience of perhaps 30, but an audience that seems vast enough to fill Carnegie Hall. The squirming about on the piano bench, trying to ignore the buzzing in one's ears.

You begin playing, making only occasional mistakes -- your sweaty fingers and your brain both on automatic pilot, until, two minutes later -- it's over! You stagger back to your seat to the polite applause of the bored parents of other young pianists.

The joys of being ten years old, at your first piano recital.

And today, the nightmare all comes back. My piano teacher has signed me up for a recital on December 11. This recital is sponsored by the music school through which I take lessons. Each teacher is expected to present two students. I'm one of hers.

She was apologetic. The notice was short. My heart palpitations were real. Her fear that I might quit taking lessons from her was not totally unfounded. She explained that she was required to place two names on the program, but that I -- as a mature and financially self-paying adult -- was not required to go through with it. Many of her students suddenly contract "illnesses" at the last moment, she assured me. It's my decision. Entirely.

I'd be playing the second movement to Beethoven's Pathetique sonata, the five-minute Adagio for which I first sought her guidance nearly two years ago. You'd think I could play it backwards and forwards by now.

She had me play it over again for her. She professed herself charmed. Perhaps a stumble here and there, a few missteps maybe. Perhaps a little excessively soft in the bass line? But, all in all, exhibiting great musicality on my part. My playing leaves her virtually in tears.

I regarded her raptures skeptically. Didn't my second year teacher say something equally soothing about my interpretation of Busy Beavers? Still, I've always been notably susceptible to flattery.

Will I actually show up? I'm going to work on my old friend from the Pathetique this week, and go over it again with her next lesson. I'll decide then.

She assures me that the music critic from the Seattle Times will not be present. Just a bunch of dewy-eyed parents, listeners who have ears only for their own precocious little dumplings.

Don't expect to hear more about this, by the way -- i.e., whether I chickened out, or showed up and shocked the audience with my incompetence. Don't expect me to tell you about it even if I actually show up and feel my performance was a musical triumph. I'm too easily deceived by a sense of my own awesomeness to be a fair judge.

No, unless a talent scout from Julliard happens to be present and offers me a scholarship, I think the outcome of this unfortunate affair will remain my private little secret.

To the barricades

2011-11-17T19:16:00.000-08:00

If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man's fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending.
--Joan Didion (1970)

The rumble of street demonstations, the flash of police batons, and the smell of tear gas (or, more likely, pepper spray) once more assaults the senses. Seattle won't be excluded. Today, Seattle commuters nervously awaited the drive home. An organization demonstrating against the state's budget and in favor of "Jobs Not Cuts" announced plans to demonstrate during evening rush hour at the Montlake bridge, near my house -- one of the few bridges, aside from I-5, that link the downtown to Seattle "north of the cut," as well as to Seattle's north end suburbs. The original organizing group has been joined by other protest movements and by labor unions.

At the last minute, the demonstrators agreed to move the protest to the University bridge, to avoid interfering with emergency hospital traffic near Montlake. The Seattle Times now reports that about 700 demonstrators showed up, and were able to shut down bridge traffic for about an hour and a half.

On May 5, 6, and 8, 1970, University of Washington students protesting the Vietnam war shut down the I-5 freeway, marching four miles along the freeway from the University to downtown. Marchers were estimated to number 7,000, 10,000, and 15,000, respectively, on those three dates. No one in 1970 much cared whether emergency vehicles were being inconvenienced.

I doubt that the demonstrations in 1970 -- huge as they were -- hastened the end of American military involvement in Vietnam, over three years later. I have even greater doubt that the protests going on now will hasten bipartisan cooperation and national healing -- or stimulate the rise of a new and more responsible political party -- or ameliorate global economic trends beyond our ability to control.

The demonstrations in 1970 did permit students to blow off steam, and the protests occurring over the past few weeks do the same. I don't see what other purpose they can serve, other than inconvenience commuters -- also overwhelmingly part of the "99 percent" -- who just want to get home.

Sometimes, a really big protest movement does effect real change by overturning the government in power. France in 1789, Russia in 1917, Egypt in 2011. Unfortunately, such revolutions tend to be followed by unforeseen and unpleasant consequences. Even if the nation itself may, in the long run, be benefitted, the revolutionaries themselves aften end up disillusioned, impoverished, and even, as the revolution feeds upon itself, executed.

Our 700 protesters at University bridge don't strike me as Jacobins or Octobrists. They seem to be nice folks who just hope for a better world for themselves and their families ... as do we all. Our problems seem insoluable at present, but maybe not. Maybe there are solutions to our dysfunctional political and economic system, and we'll find a way to muddle our way through to those solutions. I hope so.

But I doubt that blocking bridges is a step toward the answer.
---------------------
Photo: Seattle freeway protesters. May 5, 1970

Raccoon wars

2011-11-15T17:06:00.000-08:00

The nice drugstore clerk seemed a bit surprised when I told her what I wanted: an old-fashioned transistor radio. No, I definitely didn't need earphones. Or MP3 compatibility, or whatever else they might have as options. (Nor will I be taking photos with it, or summoning up the internet.) But she had just what I wanted. Something by Sony, something you could have bought in 1970. And it cost just $19.99.

She would have been more surprised if I'd told her why I wanted it.

Persistent readers may recall my past discussions of what I like to term "the raccoon wars." If not, you may wish to click here and review the record. The raccoon who considers my house within his juridical boundaries has grown ever bolder. While I was off on vacation last month, my cat care person found it impossible to keep him from entering the cat door. He gobbled great quantities of cat food, despoiled the cats' water supply, wandered throughout the house, upstairs and down, and generally made himself at home.

Within a couple of hours of my return, he pushed his largeness in through the cat door, finding himself mildly surprised to confront me face to face. Later that week, while I was upstairs reading in bed, something large and bushy appeared in my peripheral vision. .... I looked up quickly, and there he was, my masked nemesis, mildly curious as to whether I might have stashed a little extra food somewhere within the bedroom.

But the radio, you ask? Be patient, I'm getting there. Next week, I'll be gone for four days over Thanksgiving, ok? Do I turn the house over to El Bandito? Not if I can help it. Someone told me that someone had told them that they knew of someone who kept a radio or TV booming loudly while they were out, thereby fooling their own wily raccoon into believing that someone was home.

I'm not going to leave my stereo booming for four days and nights, but I figure that a little radio with a couple of AA cells -- placed a couple of feet from the cat door -- might work. But who knows? This critter wasn't born yesterday, and he has nerves of steel. Or, should I say, brass.

If he isn't fooled, the next step will be a new cat door with electronic keys for my cats' collars. But, as I suggested in my earlier post, that would require hiring a carpenter to install a completely new back door with a properly sized cut in which to install the cat door.

If a hippie-era transistor radio works, I'd prefer to get by for a mere $19.99.

Voice in the wilderness

2011-11-13T10:37:00.000-08:00

Belgrade, Yugoslavia. My fellow students and I -- undergraduates, naïve and excited -- were herded into a somber meeting room at the American Embassy. The Ambassador, a pleasant, middle aged gentleman, welcomed us to Yugoslavia and suggested things we might want to see and think about while visiting that Communist -- yet officially neutral -- nation.

Despite having read George F. Kennan's book, American Diplomacy, just a year earlier for a class in political science, I don't recall having been impressed by the fact that its author was now standing just a few feet in front of me, extending his welcome. Nor do I now recall anything specific that he told us.

What I didn't know about Mr. Kennan at the time would have filled a book. Several books, in fact. Over the years, I've come to realize that Kennan's importance in the shaping of post-war American foreign policy far exceeded that of his diplomatic mission to a country in the Balkans. A number of years ago, I read his two volumes of memoirs, and began to realize not only the importance of his thoughts and insights into foreign policy, but the complexity and subtlety of his withdrawn and reflective personality.

Then, yesterday, I read a feature-length review in the New Yorker of John Lewis Gaddis's new biography.¹ I had barely absorbed the New Yorker's analysis of Kennan's life, when this morning's New York Times book review section featured a similarly lengthy review of the Gaddis biography -- a review written by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Clearly the time has arrived for a new appraisal of this unusual diplomat, thinker, foreign policy analyst, and writer of careful and sensitive prose. Kennan's life and thought confronted difficult issues in American politics and diplomacy, issues that we have never resolved successfully, and probably never will.

How does a relatively transparent democracy with all its ambient noise and competing political demands -- i.e., a nation like the United States -- conduct a skillful, nuanced foreign policy that seeks to secure goals critical to its own interests -- not just goals that focus ahead a day or two, or until the next election, but ones that contemplate our relationship with the world 25 or 50 years in the future?

Kennan's fame today is as the author of the policy of "containment," a concept he first expressed in 1946 while he was posted to the American Embassy in Moscow. He explained his thoughts in a lengthy telegram to the State Department -- the legendary "Long Telegram," reputed to be the longest telegram ever received by State. He expanded his ideas a year later in an article published in Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym "X."

Kennan had never believed during World War II that the Soviets saw the Western allies as anything but allies of convenience, to be discarded as soon as the war ended. He was less concerned about the Soviet Union's being Communist than with its being Russian. Kennan was fluent in the Russian language. Although he loved Russian civilization and the Russian people, he had no illusions about the endemic paranoia of the Russian people, their longing for despotic leaders, and their historic urge toward territorial expansion -- national traits that shaped the character of both Tsarist Russia and the Communist Soviet Union. The Soviets should be "contained" whenever their urge towards expansion conflicted with American interests or world peace, Kennan urged. There was no need, however, to be proactive in the sense of attacking Russia -- no "pre-emptive strikes," as our present jargon would put it.

If successfully contained, Kennan argued, the Soviet Union would ultimately implode because -- ironically -- of its own internal contradictions. And so it did, nearly a half century later.

Kennan's long term analysis created a sensation both within and without the State Department, filling a vacuum in post-war foreign policy analysis in government circles. "Containment" became a catch phrase, shaping policies under the Truman, Eisenhower, and subsequent administrations. It became a justification for the war in Vietnam, a war that Kennan deplored.

Kennan soon felt that his theory of "containment" had been hijacked by militarists who used the concept to support the build-up of massive American military forces, resulting in the arms race of the Cold War. Although he believed that military force occasionally would be necessary in limited situations with limited objectives, Kennan conceived "containment" primarily in economic and diplomatic terms. Kissinger -- our quintessential "realist" in foreign policy -- seems to ignore or belittle this distinction in his review. He is attacted to the obvious realism in Kennan's own thought, but believes that Kennan "wimped out" when it came to putting it into practice.

Kennan's life and thought are fascinating as history. But more important are the questions his life and thought raise about our ability to shape and implement foreign policy objectives that are rational and directed to both the short term and the long term. Kennan strongly believed -- as does Kissinger, as indicated in his book Diplomacy -- that foreign policy is too important to be left to amateur politicians. To some degree, at least, it must be developed by experts who have devoted their professional lives to its study and practice. How to balance this need for expertise and dispassion with the demands of a democratic form of government is a question that awaits resolution.

This week's Republican debates regarding foreign policy do not offer much assurance that we have attained the proper balance.

In conclusion, Kennan's life and thought are worth study. The new Gaddis biography sounds like an excellent overview of the subject, one that I look forward to reading. I hope the publicity generated by this weekend's two excellent reviews of the biography encourages anyone interested in diplomacy and foreign policy to give it a read.
------------------------------------
¹ John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan, An American Life (Penguin Press 2011).

NOTE (11-14-11): The Economist's own review of Prof. Gaddis's biography, in this week's issue, points out that Gaddis has on past occasion expressed his admiration for the foreign policies of Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush. Gaddis clearly disagrees with Kennan's assessment of Reagan's foreign policy, which Kennan found to be "simply childish, inexcusably childish, unworthy of people charged with the responsibility of conducting the affairs of a great nation in an endangered world." Instead, Gaddis believes that Reagan actually brought Kennan's strategy to a successful conclusion. The Economist sides with Kennan, observing that

If Kennan's] concern for the costs of bellicose foreign policy, rather than [Reagan's] enthusiasm for imperial exercise of American power, had dominated the last decade, it would have made for a sounder grand strategy.

Amen.

Feet of clay

2011-11-10T19:36:00.000-08:00

In a recent article discussing the growing popularity of pet care products, the Economist made the offhand and gratuitous comment that dogs

are costlier than cats, but superior in every respect.

Readers of the British magazine are, by nature, civilized and reserved. But eyebrows were raised in subsequent letters to the editor.

The Economist has long been a favorite magazine. The statement quoted above, however, made casually and neither ironically nor as the writer's quirky personal opinion but rather as the recitation of a well-established fact, is so startlingly bizarre and patently false that the journal's accuracy with respect to other matters -- as well as the good judgment of its editors -- is called into serious question.

I feel as though I had long relied upon the opinions of a distinguished Harvard professor, until -- one day -- his mask slipped, and behind the mask I discovered Rick Perry.

I'm not canceling my subscription, but will certainly read the Economist with a more skeptical eye in the future.

Caution in the Middle East

2011-11-08T13:03:00.000-08:00

Iran is developing nuclear weapons. That seems probable, according to a report provided to the Security Council by the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency. Some of Iran's secret work might be devoted to peaceful use of nuclear energy, according to the report, but other efforts "are specific to nuclear weapsons."

For the past several weeks, Israel has been warning of a possible bombing attack on Iran's nuclear development sites. Many observers believe that the recent assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists and the dissemination of a computer worm designed to interfere with operation of Iranian uranium enrichment centrifuges have been the work of Israeli and/or American agents.

I am totally against nuclear weapons proliferation. I have been hoping, despite evidence to the contrary, that Iran was sincere in its assertions that its nuclear program was designed solely for the peaceful use of atomic energy. The U.N. report, a copy of which was leaked this week, makes my hope seem excessively optimistic.

Nevertheless, the idea of an Israeli attack on Iran is appalling. The United States, rightly or wrongly, would be perceived as complicit in such an attack. The statement this week by a spokesman for the Obama administration was not helpful:

"We, of course, never remove from the table any option in a situation like this, but we are very focused on diplomacy," said White House spokesman Jay Carney.

Instead, we should have made it clear that we would have no part in any unilateral attack on Iran or any other country. Such a statement would not preclude participation in additional international sanctions, if necessary.

We are correct in fearing proliferation of nuclear weapons. But Iran is also correct in sensing a certain arrogance on America's part, the United States possessing an enormous nuclear arsenal of its own. And Israel? Israel maintains an official stance of ambiguity as to whether it possess nuclear weapons ("nuclear opacity," they call it), but, along with India, Pakistan and North Korea, is generally believed to have developed nuclear weapons capability. (Israel, unlike Iran, has never signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.) Iran may sense a certain hypocrisy in our willingness to accept nuclear armament by nations perceived as friendly, while attacking less friendly nations for taking even preparatory steps in that direction.

Aside from the legalities of both nuclear proliferation by Iran and of a pre-emptive attack on a sovereign nation by Israel, exactly what is it about Iran's achievement of a nuclear capacity that we feel might justify such an attack? Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad tend to speak in tones of inflated inflammatory hyperbole, which is unfortunate for the success of Iran's foreign relations. But Iran's actual foreign policy has been cautious.

In 1980, lest we forget, Iran was deliberately and viciously attacked by Saddam Hussein's Iraqi forces, hoping to defeat Iran during a moment of weakness following the 1978 Revolution. The war lasted for eight years, with a devastating loss of Iranian life. Monuments to the men and boys who died in that war can be seen everywhere in Iran today. Iran suffered an estimated one million casualties, with many survivors still suffering from Iraq's use of chemical warfare.

Iranians remember well the horrors of war. They are not apt to leap willingly into a new one. Their rhetoric may sound wild, but they are not stupid: they know that a nuclear attack on Israel would bring swift retribution from many sources.

More likely, they would use their nuclear capability to increase their own credibility in foreign affairs. After the Kuwait war with Iraq, when the United States essentially eliminated Iraq's defensive capability in one day, a spokesman for another Arab country -- I don't recall which -- commented that no country would ever challenge the United States again militarily, unless it had nuclear weapons. Iranians may have been listening -- concerned less about their ability to defy America militarily than in their own ability to be taken seriously as a major player in the Middle East.

We would find a nuclear armed Iran to be an inconvenience in our relations with Middle Eastern countries. But the prospect of future inconvenience doesn't justify an attack. We dealt with similar "inconveniences" in our relations with the Soviet Union; we face similar inconveniences today in dealing with Russia and China. We can handle the diplomatic challenges.

If we look over the history of American relations in the Middle East, one lesson we should learn is that nothing is constant. A friend today is an enemy tomorrow, and vice versa. We covertly supported Saddam Hussein's war against Iran, because of the hostility of the Iranian clergy after their Revolution. Ten years later, we were attacking Iraq.

If the friendship of any nation in the Middle East today would be valuable to the United States, it would be that of Iran. The Iranian people are sophisticated, with a strong sense of pride in their nation and in its lengthy history of civilization. The country, despite years of international sanctions, is modern with a good infrastructure. Iran still has a large middle class with close ties to America and to the West in general. Today, we may feel that Iran's political leaders are impossible to deal with. These feelings can change quickly with time.

But time would not fade the memory of an armed attack so quickly. Ask any Iranian, conservative or liberal, devout or secular, and he or she will tell you that an armed attack on Iran would be a disaster for both Iran and the West. Such an attack would unite all factions against the attackers. It would unite the country behind its present rulers. It would not be forgotten, not for generations.

Let's not go there.

Bibliomania

2011-11-04T20:21:00.000-07:00

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
~Anna Quindlen

Even as a sixth grader, I took loving delight in sorting and counting my small collection of books. I assigned certain types of books to certain locations. A series of American history books for kids (the Landmark series), for example, valued highly for the books' uniform size and consistent bindings, was displayed together on a shelf especially designed for them.

I accumulated books as other guys collect baseball cards. Unlike my similar obsession with stamp collecting, moreover, my attachment to books -- not just to their contents, but to their physical incarnations -- continued beyond adolescence.

Today, the most notable thing about the interior of my house is that virtually every wall surface of any size is lined with bookshelves. My books are in no way organized. At one time, I did dream of developing a card catalogue system -- perhaps computerized -- to help myself locate any book instantaneously. It never happened. Instead, I'm forced to rely on vague impressions that a certain book may have a red cover (or was it green?) and that I last saw it somewhere in the den.

What I now possess is partly a library, but partly the fruit of a hoarder's compulsion -- analogous, I nervously suspect, to those houses filled with old newspapers in which eccentric couples are occasionally discovered crushed to death by their own obsession.

These dark thoughts are prompted by an article in this week's New Yorker by Harvard professor James Wood. Wood recently found himself confronted with the need to clear a house full of books left behind by his deceased father-in-law. The old man had pursued many enthusiasms during his life, including travel. He had read extensively with respect to each new enthusiasm. And he'd kept all the books.

The result was an interesting and eclectic library. Unfortunately, Wood discovered, in today's world, no one wants interesting and eclectic libraries, especially ones consisting of old books. There are more old books than there are available bookshelves to hold them. No one wanted to buy the books at an estate sale. Nor could he give them away. Wood never reveals what ultimately became of the collection -- a few books were accepted by collectors who poked through the collection -- but the experience forced him to think about what book collections say about their collectors.

Not much, he decides. Who knows if the old guy even read most of them? The piles of books seemed to be mere monuments to knowledge that their owner possessed, or wished to possess, or wished to appear to possess. The fact that Wood didn't really much like his father-in-law seems to have sharpened his contempt for the gentleman's legacy.

I was struck, as I worked through my father-in-law's books, how quickly I became alienated from their rather stupid materiality. I began to resent his avariciousness, which resembled, in death, any other kind of avariciousness for objects.

So he spent his life buying books, Wood thinks. So what?

After all, can I really contend that my collection of books, ranged on shelves like some bogus declaration of achievement ..., tells my children anything more about me than my much smaller collection of postcards and photographs?

I feel somewhat devastated, reading these lines. Are my books simply a fraudulent assertion of my erudition? I walk about my house, gently carressing the covers of a few favorite, carefully-bound volumes.

I long ago promised a fellow book lover (Pat) that I'd leave him all of my books, should I move on to that Great Library in the Sky ahead of him. In fact I actually have that bequest written into my will. It was all in good fun for a long time, but lately, whenever the subject of my books arises, Pat nervously discusses the small amount of space available in his own home. My mind leaps forward, to those dread days following my hypothetical funeral; I see Pat wandering about my house, wringing his hands, wondering whatever he'll do with this unwelcome bounty. His wife would never allow him to haul them all into their home, even if there were room for them. Must he pay to put them into storage? He'll find no library or bookstore interested in them. Wood convinces me of that. But dare he -- a lover of books himself -- consign my gorgeous collection to the dump? I have bequeathed him a conundrum and a curse.

I pull myself together. Pat will just have to work it out on his own.

Wood is a good writer, and he managed to depress me, momentarily, with his certainties. And yet, I have certainties, too. My book collection, accumulated year by year since childhood, is an intellectual resource, a proven provider of amusement, and an anchor that gives my life -- with its ever-changing phases and interests -- a sense of continuity.

I have friends whose society is delightful to me; they are persons of all countries and of all ages; distinguished in war, in council, and in letters; easy to live with, always at my command.
~-Petrarch

Books are my friends, and, as with human friends, I'm not tossing them out simply because I don't know how they'll some day get along without me.

When the going was different

2011-11-02T10:05:00.000-07:00

Trekking overseas always has its down times -- hanging out in airports, sprawled on the ground after a day's hike, snuggled up at night in your sleeping bag with a headlamp on your forehead -- times for relaxation when reading seems the perfect complement to the day's adventures. And books about travel seem most enjoyable when I myself am a traveler.

I took three such books with me to Nepal. One I've only begun reading. One was requisitioned by Pascal to press an unusual flower he discovered. But the third -- a sizeable tome -- I read from cover to cover.

Mark Twain, among his other claims to fame ("All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn.'"--Ernest Hemingway), has been praised as America's first travel writer.

Until 1867, Twain was known merely as a humorist, lecturer, newspaper writer, and author of a highly popular collection of short essays called The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. But in that year, promoters organized a five-month tour of Europe and the Middle East -- perhaps the first organized American tour of foreign lands. The tour was by cruise ship -- the Quaker City -- a side-wheel steamer, with a leisurely schedule. Stops at ports of call were lengthy, allowing its seventy passengers to do extensive travel on their own before returning to the ship and proceeding to the next port.

Twain persuaded the editors of the Daily Alta California, a San Francisco newspaper, to pay his costs, in exchange for his weekly column to be dispatched from overseas. His dispatches, together with some additional concluding reports to the New York Herald and the New York Tribune, became America's first travel book -- The Innocents Abroad.

Twain's book makes great vacation reading. Leisurely and humorous, Innocents Abroad evokes a world where travel was slower, and where Americans were less aware of how life was lived abroad -- even in Western nations, such as France and Italy.

Crossing the Atlantic was in itself a lengthy endeavor, and not always pleasant. Twain discusses with relish his pleasure in being the only man within sight not flattened by seasickness. The Quaker City put in at the Azores, whose somewhat slow moving (and thinking) Portuguese inhabitants were themselves the object of Twain's curiosity and ridicule, before finally reaching the European continent at Gibralter.

Twain shared many of his nineteenth century compatriots' prejudices: contempt for European customs different from those of America; dislike of most great works of art and architecture, which he often considered dusty and boring; a rather startling Protestant boosterism and accompanying contempt for Catholicism. But, as his weekly dispatches reveal, Twain also showed growth and increased tolerance for cultural differences as the trip progressed.

To us today, perhaps, the most interesting portion of the book is the final third -- covering the visit to Turkey and, especially, the Holy Land. Most of the Middle East at the time was ruled from Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire, as it had been for centuries. European influence was minimal. Britain and France had not yet acquired their mandates as the spoils of World War I. Jews were a small minority group within Arab Palestine. The area was untouristed, dirty, impoverished, sleepy, and -- to Twain, at least -- often appalling.

His party worked its way down from Damascas, through the Holy Land, and finally to Egypt. What impresses today is that -- to his group, at least -- the term "Holy Land" was not simply a geographical description. His fellow travelers, like perhaps most Westerners for years to come, were visiting Palestine as religious pilgrims as much as tourists. They were in awe to find themselves walking in the actual footsteps of Jesus himself, actually visiting places they had been reading about and viewing in illustrations since childhood.

Even Twain, the cynic -- but a cynic who generally refers to Jesus as "Our Savior" --was often impressed, even as he scoffed at the multitudes of splinters advertised as relics of the True Cross, and at the claims by religious orders to have determined the exact location of various events from the Bible, locations on which they built their churches and chapels.

Innocents Abroad captures a picture of the Holy Land at a time when it had changed little physically since Biblical times; it also captures an image of Americans who, whatever their professed religious beliefs at the time of the trip, were profoundly moved by a visit to this legendary part of the world, Americans who almost universally had been strongly influenced by Protestant childhoods and years of attendance at Sunday School.

Finally, the book is interesting as marking Twain's transition from a popular humorist to a serious literary writer. As Jane Jacobs, who wrote the introduction to my edition of the book, concludes:

Without falsifying the distinct American sensibility that singled out Twain, then and now, as the quintessential American author, he stepped from -- or alongside -- his culture into a larger and different context. The Mark Twain who, by upbringing was Tom Sawyer and a Connecticut Yankee, became the mature Mark Twain who could inhabit both Huck, the orphaned redneck, and Jim, the runaway slave.

Mark Twain's mental growth, observable throughout his five months of newspaper essays, is emblematic of America's own similar growth and increased maturity in the nearly century and a half since Innocents Abroad was published.

It also suggests an excellent reason to encourage travel abroad by all Americans.

A year after his return, Twain concluded the book with a retrospective newspaper account of the trip, expressing sentiments with which all travelers can sympathize:

Nearly one year has flown since this notable pilgrimage was ended, and as I sit here at home in San Francisco thinking, I am moved to confess that day by day the mass of my memories of the excursion have grown more and more pleasant as the disagreeable incidents of travel which encumbered them flitted one by one out of my mind -- and now, if the Quaker City were weighing her anchor to sail away on the same cruise again, nothing could gratify me more than to be a passenger.

Mark Twain is always a good travel companion, and never better than when sharing his own thoughts and feelings while he himself is traveling.

Trekking to Renjo La

2011-10-24T09:41:00.000-07:00

The Yak & Yeti isn't your typical Kathmandu hostelry. It's a palatial hotel, at least by local standards, set amongst beautifully landscaped grounds -- a Western oasis separated by only thin hedges from the surrounding noise and grit of central Kathmandu. Pascal and I were more than ready to embrace Nepali life, but it was perhaps appropriate that, at this early moment of transition, we met our fellow trekkers at the Yak & Yeti.

There was Anne, a rheumatologist from Kansas; her son Tom, a college graduate working in Kansas as a bartender during these times of bad unemployment; and her brother Bill, a very early retiree who lives in California. There were also David, a civil engineer from the Seattle suburb of Bainbridge Island, and his wife Caroline, an artist. We met as seven strangers, but would soon know each other's strengths and foibles more intimately than those of many long time friends. And there was Lhakpa, our Sherpa guide, who knows the Khumbu area of Nepal like the back of his hand, as well as the names and faces of virtually everyone living there.

We had a day in Kathmandu before the trek to get acquainted -- some Hindu cremations beside the river, a Buddhist stupa, pizza in Thamel, the trekker's paradise that is central Kathmandu. Some of us realized we weren't in Kansas anymore! As it were.

I had duplicated significant portions of the trek in 1995, but sixteen years can be a long time in this part of the world. Physically, there has been little change, but the Sherpa people seem better off, better dressed, more familiar with the outside world. Nowadays, the cell phone is ubiquitous. Also, the number of Western trekkers must be at least ten times what it was in 1995. Our trek was early enough in the season to beat most of the crowds, but two weeks later, as we came down from the mountains, we met virtual hordes moving up the trails -- hordes that, at lower elevations, created literal traffic jams.

But once above Namche Bazaar, we were back in a lightly populated, spiritually intense world that has changed little over the centuries since the Sherpa people first migrated here from Tibet. Tibetan Buddhist rituals continue unchanged at monasteries and in villages. Trails pass on either side of manis and chortens -- monuments that must always be passed on the left, even when doing so increases the difficulty of passage. Juniper branches burn in the morning in tiny shrines, offering their pungent fumes to heaven. Lachpa tells us stories along the trails of strange happenings, whether centuries ago or just last year -- encounters with yetis, place names based on a pregnant woman's unsuccessful attempt to find help for a difficult child birth, zombies. Yep, zombies.

Do you know why the doors in Sherpa houses are so low? For protection. Because zombies are unable to bend down when they try to enter. Zombies in the Himalayas. Lachpa tells stories of a lama who ordered the inhabitants of an entire village burned to death because of a zombie "infestation."

Does Lachpa -- an educated and worldly man -- really believe his own stories? We can't tell. Cognitive dissonance? Maybe.

Above Tengboche Monastery (12,664 ft.) we begin following the Dudh Kosi river upstream toward its source. This is all new country to me. The trail, on the east side of the river, is one rarely used by trekkers. We walk for hours without encountering another Westerner. The third day above Tengboche, we cross the river to the western bank. But not by a bridge. The river is now a broad glacier, covered by glacial till, and we cross it gingerly, climbing up and down, reflecting the 15,000 elevation in our gasps for breath. Ahead, to the north, Cho Oyu -- world's sixth highest mountain -- beckons us on. Keep at it, guys, he says. I'm worth seeing.

Having crossed the glacier, we arrive at the tiny trekker's hamlet of Gokyo (15,580 ft.), in the shadow of Cho Oyu. We spend two nights at Gokyo, acclimatizing. During our "rest day," we climb an adjacent hill, Gokyo Ri, a relentless zigzag up a barren slope to the summit at 17,990 ft. It ain't an easy climb, but the view from the top is incredible. Everest is in front of us, together with Lhotse (world's fourth highest peak). To the right, and in the distance, is Makalu. To the left of Everest is Pumori, from whose lower slopes -- the hill of Kalapatar -- Denny and I viewed Everest in 1995.

Denny and I climbed above 18,000 ft. to reach Kalapatar. Pascal has never been that high. Gokyo Ri is just ten feet under 18,000. Pascal is 6'2". He raises his hand. He leaps. His hand arguably pierces the 18,000 barrier. A personal best!

The following day, we climb to 16,700 feet -- Renjo La base camp -- where we sleep at the highest elevation at which I've ever spent a night. A beautiful camp site. We watch Everest and Lhotse glow in the sunset, and keep watching until the last beams of sunset die from the very tip of Everest. Hard to explain now that I'm back in Seattle, but it was a transcendent moment.

From the base camp, we "scampered" (yeah, sure!) over Renjo La (17,880 ft.), lingering in a small area at the pass from which we gazed at a reprise of the view from Gokyo Ri -- our final close-up view of Everest before descending steeply the western side of the pass into a new valley system with new and unfamiliar snowclad peaks. Once past Renjo La, we were definitely on our way home. It was all downhill, so to speak, to the monastery town of Thame, and then on down to Namche Bazaar, completing our loop. After a night in Namche, we trekked in a single day the entire path back down to the end of the trail at Lukla, from which we flew back to Kathmandu in our tiny and seemingly insubstantial Twin Otter.

My re-visit to the Khumbu was a richly rewarding experience, giving me perspectives on the area that I'd not experienced before. Traveling with a good friend, and meeting one of the most enjoyable group of fellow hikers I've ever trekked with. Lots of laughs, lots of political and economic discussions, interminable gin rummy tournaments at every altitude. We finally found ourselves back at the Yak & Yeti, eager to get back to our homes and families, but reluctant to separate from the like souls we'd grown so close to over a three week period.

The weather had been perfect. It had been raining in Kathmandu -- delayed monsoon -- up until the day we arrived. After we returned to Kathmandu, we learned that it had started snowing -- snowing! -- up at Namche. We trekked in a window of ideal weather. The gods had been kind to us. We must have displayed plenty of good karma.

And -- thank god -- we never did have a run-in with the zombies! It's good to be home, but I sure hope to return.

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To view 40 photographs of the trek that I've posted on Facebook, click here.

Don't go away, folks

2011-09-29T21:04:00.000-07:00

And all that he could see,
And all that he could see,
Was the other side of the mountain,
The other side of the mountain,
The other side of the mountain,
Was all that he could see.

Our abject apologies to our readers. The Northwest Corner will not be found on your favorite news stands for the next three weeks or so. We have no rational excuse for this temporary shut-down, other than the fact that our Publisher has once more been seized with the compulsion to go over the mountain, to see what he can see. This happens on occasion. He returns to Seattle each time with noticeably fewer brain cells -- the result of totally predictable hypoxia.

Nevertheless we wish him well, and we look forward to rejoining Time, Newsweek, and National Enquirer in late October as a premier source of the nation's news and commentary.

With Francis in Nepal

2011-09-28T09:54:00.001-07:00

Trekking in the Khumbu region of the Himalayas is about stunning scenery. And, with almost all of the trek taking place above 12,000 feet, it's about challenging hiking. But it's also about exposure to a foreign culture, the Tibetan Buddhism of the Sherpa people.

The Sherpas, originally from Tibet, belong to the Nyingmapa sect of Tibetan Buddhism. This sect emphasizes mysticism and -- contrary to most Westerners' concept of Buddhism -- has adopted many ceremonies, gods and demons from Bön, the pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet. Among the deities worshipped by the Sherpas are ones similar to the minor deities worshipped by the common people in ancient Rome and Greece -- local gods of mountains, streams, forests, and caves.

After a couple of days in Kathmandu (a predominantly Hindu city), we begin our actual trek on October 4 -- coincidentally, the date on which Christians honor the life of St. Francis of Assisi.

St. Francis was a fairly sophisticated man for his time and place, but his time and place were early thirteenth century Italy. I suspect, therefore, that he would have been appalled if he had ever encountered the religious practices of the Sherpas. And the dramatic representations of gods and demons in Khumbu monasteries would have seemed Satanic.

But Francis was also a strong believer in the brotherhood of all men, not merely of all Christians. He visited the Sultan of Egypt in 1219, in an attempt to convert the Sultan to Christianity. He did not succeed, but he was received warmly and is said to have left a very favorable personal impression, a lasting favorable impression not only of himself but of his Franciscan order. He embraced poverty and simplicity. He believed that nature was the "mirror of God." He called the animals, as well as humans, his brothers and sisters.

I suspect, therefore, that he would have found much to admire in the Sherpa people, and much to respect in the spiritual values of Tibetan Buddhism and the manner in which it affects the lives of its adherents -- although not, of course, in its actual beliefs and practices. He would have sensed his kinship with monasteries that pray for the happiness of "all sentient beings."

St. Francis never wavered in his devotion to Christianity, but he sought out the good in all people. I can easily imagine his joining us, trudging along the trail beside us, ever interested in the lives and scenes he saw about him. Perhaps surprising one of the local monks by sitting down beside him with his own begging bowl, enjoying together a simple meal of dal bhat.

I'll keep him in mind next Tuesday as I begin my trek.

Back to campus

2011-09-26T19:30:00.000-07:00

Class began today at the University of Washington. And, right on schedule, the Northwest's month-long drought splashed itself to an end. The rain poured down pretty much all day.

I wandered across campus in late afternoon, one of a few final days of fast walking I'm giving myself before leaving town Friday for my trek. All seemed calm and quiet.

Quiet as far as unusual activity went, I mean; but not devoid of noise. As my purposeful strides drew me closer to Red Square -- the heart of the campus -- I was practically knocked out of my hiking shoes by blasts of amplified sound. Whoever organizes such things had chosen to welcome students back with a performance by Macklemore, a Seattle hip hop performer. No complaints about the music itself, but the decibel level would bring tears of joy to an audiologist as he calculates the increased demand for hearing devices another forty years down the pike.

I also encountered a number of sadly scruffy figures shuffling about campus, gentlemen well past the average age of matriculation and seemingly carrying all their possessions on their backs. Some of the homeless have migrated to the U District from downtown in recent years. They may dimly recall having heard that students are more laid back than the general population, more welcoming, cheerfully communal with their possessions and cash. If so, I fear their arrival on campus comes a decade or so too late.

My take on today's UW students is that they are the product of much higher admissions standards; of a general increase in competitiveness within the student population; and of child rearing by parents who scheduled their kids' every free moment with studies and activities, an intense and active approach to life that the students have pretty well internalized. I hear a lot of articulate talk about classes, readings, problem sets, and exams. Nice kids, abstractly sympathetic to the homeless, but probably too busy to hang out with persons less motivated than themselves, let alone offer to share with them their pizzas and beer.

But then my mind returns to that crowd of young people, packed in tight around the Macklemore stage. Their faces appeared trance-like. They were waving their hands in the air. I cautiously wondered if there was some Golden Calf on the stage, something receiving their pagan worship. But this was the first day of school. Summer 2011 wasn't exactly the Summer of Love. A few kids may have been discreetly smoking a joint or two, but no clouds of incense-like smoke hovered over the crowd. No one called the Police "the Pigs," or suggested storming the Administration Building. The performance seemed politely received by students who -- behind their apparently entranced faces -- probably were half wondering where each of tomorrow's classes would be held.

Sure, it was noisy. But, I didn't really mind. As those bumper strips read: "If my radio seems too loud, you're too old." I sighed, pondering the profundity contained in that claim. I crept quietly off campus and walked quickly home.

Their man in Moscow

2011-09-20T18:37:00.000-07:00

In our eyes, the Cold War tended to reduce the 1917 Russian Revolution to a morality play, with characters like Lenin and Trotsky marching about like cartoon villains.

The plot was thus: The Tsar was overthrown by the good revolutionaries, headed by Kerensky; the evil Bolsheviks stole the revolution and murdered all their opponents; the Western allies, appalled by the threat of World Communism, sent support to the good "White Russian" counter-revolutionaries. The tragic result was well known, and half the world map had been painted Red under a hammer and sickle.

The reality was more complex and more interesting; we in the West may now be ready to consider it more dispassionately.

The Western observer best qualified to analyze the Revolution -- by his background and training, and by his being in the right place at the right time -- was a young British diplomat named R. H. Bruce Lockhart. Lockhart was the British Vice Consul in Moscow at the outbreak of World War I, eventually assuming the role of Acting Consul-General when his immediate superior was transferred. When the Western allies failed to recognize the revolutionary governments after the fall of the Tsar in 1917, Lockhart remained in Moscow as a British agent, treated as a diplomat at times by both the British and the Soviets, but lacking diplomatic immunity. Following an assassination attempt on Lenin in 1918, critically injuring the Soviet leader, Lockhart was arrested and imprisoned awaiting trial. He was released in exchange for the release of Bolshevik detainees in Britain.

In 1932, Lockhart wrote a memoir of his years in Russia, based on his extremely detailed diaries, entitled Memoirs of a British Agent. The book became a best seller when released, and was made into a movie by Warner Bros.

Lockhart's memoir is well worth reading now, simply as his candid account of his early years as a young, personable and sociable vice consul, and for his descriptions of Russian landscapes, personalities, and pre-Revolutionary society. He became highly fluent in Russian, which gave him a significant advantage over other British diplomats, including the ambassador himself in St. Petersburg (the tsarist capital).

But even more interesting to us today are his observations of the causes and course of the March and October Revolutions. The cause of the Tsar's forced abdication, to Lockhart, was simple: the ineptitude and corruption of the tsarist government, qualities that lead to enormous Russian losses in the war, and disastrous defeats.

What it is important to realize is that from the first the revolution was a revolution of the people. From the first moment neither the Duma nor the intelligentsia had any control of the situation. Secondly, the revolution was a revolution for land, bread and peace -- but, above all, for peace. There was only one way to save Russia from going Bolshevik. That was to allow her to make peace. It was because he would not make peace that Kerensky went under. It was solely because he promised to stop the war that Lenin came to the top.

Alexander Kerensky, the Social-Revolutionary leader after the March revolution, was, for the first four months, "worshipped as a god." But he and his government made the fatal mistake of trying "to drive back to the trenches a nation that had already finished with the war."

The sole concern of the British Foreign Office throughout this period, with respect to Russia, was to keep Russia from making peace. Britain was fighting a war of attrition on the Western Front. She was desperate to keep Germany distracted by a threat on its Eastern Front. But Kerensky eventually lost the confidence of the people by his support of the war, and Lenin struck at the opportunity. ("History will not forgive us if we do not assume power!") Promising to end Russia's involvement in the war, the Bolsheviks seized control in November 1917 (by our calendar).

The British at the time did not oppose the Bolsheviks because they were Communists -- they didn't take Lenin and his party seriously, believing they were a rabble that would fall within months. (Many in the Foreign Office -- showing their total ignorance of the political situation in Russia -- suspected the Bolsheviks of being German agents.) Britain's sole concern with the revolution, again, Lockhart emphasizes, was that it not prejudice Russian status as an allied belligerent.

After the Soviets signed a separate peace with the Germans (Brest-Litovsk, Feb. 1918), Lockhart remained a lonely voice in Moscow, urgently trying to build ties between the Western allies and the new Soviet rulers. He argued that Britain had nothing to lose in maintaining correct relations with the newly neutral government, especially since its leaders showed some interest in leaning as neutrals toward the West and away from Germany. The Allies, however, since before the revolution, had troops stationed in Archangel and Murmansk to protect allied shipping, troops that they now used to occupy and control those critical Arctic ports. The Foreign Office insisted that Lockhart pressure the Soviets into permitting intervention of allied forces against the Germans, passing from those ports through Soviet territory to the German front.

While Lockhart attempted to deal with Trotsky (at that point, his primary Soviet contact), the Allies were secretly planning to intervene in Russia, with or without Soviet permission. Lockhart's reasonably friendly personal relations with the Soviet leaders faded as suspicions grew as to Allied intentions and, therefore, as to his own integrity. The planned Allied intervention was wholly unsuccessful, the number of forces committed to the action being ludicrously small. In the summer of 1918, the assassination of Lenin was attempted, almost costing him his life. Lockhart and other foreign nationals were arrested, and "the Terror" against suspected opponents of the government was underway, a campaign conducted in direct retribution for the shooting.

The unfolding in Russia of these threatening and historic developments, described against the background of Lockhart's personal life and his rapidly deteriorating relations with his own Foreign Office, makes gripping reading. His observations of many of the well known Russian and Bolshevik leaders¹ -- such as this description of the contrasting personalities of Lenin and Trotsky -- are perceptive:

Trotsky was all temperament -- an individualist and an artist, on whose vanity even I could play with some success. Lenin was impersonal and almost inhuman. His vanity was proof against all flattery. The only appeal that one could make to him was to his sense of humour, which, if sardonic, was highly developed. ... Trotsky was a great organizer and a man of immense physical courage. But morally, he was as incapable of standing against Lenin as a flea would be against an elephant.

When Lockhart returned to Britain at the age of 31, after being released from Soviet detention, he had virtually no allies left in the Foreign Office. Playing Cassandra is no way to make friends among your superiors, especially when your views and advice have been proved correct in virtually all respects and your powerful superiors' obstinancy and blunders have resulted in disastrous consequences for your nation.

Lockhart performed occasional services for the British government during his remaining years -- but his career in the foreign service was ruined and finished. He had been sentenced, in absentia, to death in Russia. He could never return to the country he loved, in which he had spent the most exciting and productive years of his life, and in which he had left behind many friends. He died in 1970 at the age of 83.
-----------------------

¹Also perceptive are his portraits of Allied, including American, officials. Although American troops did contribute to the joint occupation of the Arctic ports, America in general played little part in the Russian drama during the time Lockhart was there. In general, the Soviet leaders were less hostile to the Americans than they were to the British, French and Italians. Lockhart describes the American ambassador, David R. Francis:

He was a kind, old gentleman, who was susceptible to flattery and swallowed any amount of it. His knowledge of anything beyond banking and poker was severely limited. He had a traveling spittoon -- a contraption with a pedal -- which he took with him everywhere. When he wished to emphasize a point, bang would go the pedal, followed by a well-aimed expectoration.

Nature's beauty

2011-09-19T09:17:00.000-07:00

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower ...
--Blake

That photograph of the Himalayas that I added to yesterday's posting keeps drawing me back. It reminds me of something that I'm apt to forget, sitting here at home -- how incredibly beautiful are the Himalayas, how overpowering their presence when they surround you.

This sensation of being overawed by natural beauty can be almost religious in its intensity. It's easy to understand how pagans, experiencing this ecstasy in the wilderness, were led to believe in great unseen gods living atop their mountains. Christian theologians suggest that the beauty of nature is a pale reflection of the beauty of God himself, our souls' foretaste of heaven.

And yet, when you try to analyze the experience, it tends to evaporate. What are these mountains? Just protuberances of the earth's crust, either uplifted by techtonic collisions, like the Himalayas, or by volcanic action, like Mt. Rainier -- protuberances covered by layers of water in its opaque, solid phase. Interesting scientifically, certainly, but why "beautiful"? Why "awe-inspiring"? Whence this feeling of being so moved, at times, that you feel almost heartbroken?

The beauty is not inherent in the mountains themselves, is it? It somehow exists within our brains. But our brains evolved through natural selection. What was the evolutionary value of developing a sense of beauty? Does aesthetic appreciation help us seek food or avoid danger? Does it help us attract mates and reproduce? Not so far as we can tell.

Some anthropologists have noted that we feel happiest either when we are in an enclosed "cozy" space, or when we are somewhere above our surroundings, some place with a great "view." These sensations, they suggest, may just be displacements of our evolved instincts to find a safe cave and to seek out a viewpoint where we could observe available game and threats from predators. But these familiar but mild sensations -- the comfort of a happy evening at home by the fire, the pleasure of a great view from your living room window -- aren't really what I'm talking about.

Some scientists say that our emotional response to various phenomena of nature --"beautiful!" "awe-inspiring!" -- may be nothing more than useless neurological artifacts left over from the evolution of other, more useful instincts -- perhaps the search for a cave and a view, discussed above, or perhaps qualities related to sexual attraction. They are thus "accidental" parts of our emotional equipment, misfirings of our neurological systems, enjoyable but meaningless from an evolutionary perspective. (Similarly, some scientists suggest that even our sensation of being conscious and self-aware is evolutionarily accidental and meaningless.)

We have no definitive answers. All we know is that beauty is indeed in the eye (brain!) of the beholder, but that we all seem wired to see beauty in similar phenomena -- in high snowy mountains, in wild places, in deep lakes, in waterfalls, in starry skies. It's a mystery, but a mystery that adds much to our human lives.

Into thin air

2011-09-18T13:03:00.000-07:00

It seems like just yesterday that I was exclaming, "Only three more months!" And now, Pascal and I are only twelve days from flying from the West Coast -- Pascal from San Francisco and I from Seattle -- and converging at Seoul, whence we fly together to Bangkok. A short night's sleep in an airport hotel in Bangkok, and then a morning flight to Kathmandu.

Total flight time of 20½ hours, with a one-hour layover in Seoul and about twelve hours overnight in Bangkok. We'll step off the plane in Nepal with dazed and weary grins on our faces, eager to meet our five fellow hikers.

I've done enough of these treks that you'd think I'd have all the equipment I'd ever need. But the equipment lists we're provided always come up with new items, and stuff I already own gets worn out, out-dated, or -- most often -- misplaced. I found myself wandering around REI yesterday with a shopping list in one hand and a shopping basket in the other, busily increasing the size of the co-op rebate I'll receive next spring. (Pollyanna me, always focused on the silver lining!)

I'm now pretty well set to go. It's just a matter of squeezing everything into my duffel, and making sure I don't exceed the maximum allowed weight.

The itinerary has changed slightly since we first signed up for the trip. We now plan to trek the same route that Denny and I followed in 1995 as far as Tengboche monastery (12,867 ft.), instead of branching off at Namche Bazaar (11,286 ft.). From Tengboche, we'll diverge from the Everest base camp trail and head northwest toward the Gokyo valley.

I would have preferred the original route, because it would have eliminated one day of duplication with my earlier trek, but the trail to Tengboche is very scenic, and it does give Pascal a chance to see the rather impressive monastery. We camped in a tent on the monastery grounds in 1995, and it was awe-inspiring to be awakened at sunrise by the blowing of extremely deep horns, the pounding of drums, and the eerie chanting of the monks. I'd never known my teenaged nephew to jump out of bed and get dressed so fast -- without being ordered or urged to do so! We rushed over to the monastery to see what we could see.

The weather forecast for Kathmandu for the next ten days calls for daily thundershowers. We'll be arriving in Nepal at the tail-end of the summer monsoon. I'm hoping for dry weather by the time we're on the trail. Pascal and I ran into one day of heavy rain at exactly this same time of year -- two years ago on the Annapurna trail -- when the monsoon was abnormally prolonged. But even on that trip, most days were dry and sunny.

As usual, at this point before a trip departure, I'm excited and trying to keep myself from obsessing over various things that might go wrong. I've been trying to keep well exercised, without somehow spraining an ankle. I remember a bike trip I was on once. We were missing one poor guy, a dedicated soul who had religiously maintained his daily bicycling regimen as long as possible. He crashed and broke his hip the week before he was due to fly out of Seattle.

And on that happy note, I'll say a small prayer for my own safety! Readers of this blog will hear all they ever wanted to know -- and more! -- about my experiences after my return in late October.
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Photo: Tengboche monastery (stock photo). Click on the photo for an impressive close-up view.

Take me out to the hot dog stand

2011-09-14T11:45:00.000-07:00

I never learn. Back in March, a friend who buys Mariners' season's tickets each year once again gave me a chance to buy in for a few games. Wow, I thought (as I'd thought so many times in the past): a home game against the Yankees in September. Two division leaders showing us a preview of the play-offs! Or, at worst, a battle for the wild card.

Last night was the game. Pat M. and I walked to the stadium from downtown. The Yanks had carried out their side of my plans, holding a nice four-game lead over Boston. The Mariners? Uh oh. Not so much. A 62-86 season to date, and lolling about comfortably in the division cellar.

Again. For another year. The crowd was underwhelming (see inset).

Make that record 62-87, because they lost again last night, 3-2. But, I have to admit, it was an interesting game, as the score suggests. The game wasn't lost until Ichiro was picked off stealing second, with two out in the ninth inning.

But there's more to baseball than the score. Or, in fact, more than the play on the field. In terms of square footage, I'd guess that as much space is allotted to the concourses running around the exterior of the stadium, including the dozens of concession stands, as is to the seating itself.

And, like the kid I am, I gave as much thought to what was available out in the concourse as I did to the game itself. My own personal score card for the game: Start of the first inning -- jumbo dog with sauerkraut and condiments, bag of Fritos and coke. End of third -- soothing draft of IPA. End of sixth -- cup of tiny ice cream balls, mint chocolate. (I passed up the opportunity offered by vendors to buy my choice of pink or blue cotton candy.) I have, in fact, eaten more steadily throughout games in the past, but Pat was restraining himself last night putting some brakes on my own dreams of gluttony.

In my near future, no doubt: a Lipitor prescription.

My second and final game of the season. Not like the old days, when I might go a half dozen times a year. Baseball's a great game. But for a fair-weather fan like myself, twice a year is about all I can persuade myself to attend, so long as the team's sporting a 62-87 record. C'mon guys. You don't even have to get into the play-offs, but you've got to give us fans some reason to keep up our hopes right down to the end of the season.

But, as an excuse to eat all that great junk food that I'd never be seen eating "in real life," the night was a treat and complete success.

It means "Stop." Period.

2011-09-12T11:22:00.000-07:00

Government is Evil.

Those words have come to be America's mantra during this past decade. Not only is government evil when it oppresses other nations by an aggressive military policy, or when it oppresses citizens at home by invading their civil liberties, as liberals have always argued. Conservatives now claim that it's evil when it seeks to tax anybody at all, including the wealthy; when it implements public efforts to help the poor; when it tries merely to fund and maintain long existing and until now widely accepted governmental programs.

And now, it appears, it's evil even when it simply tries to enforce traffic laws.

Communities all over the nation have adopted modern camera technology to catch and fine drivers who speed and run red lights. The camera does what a cop would do if we had enough of them to watch over every intersection.

Many citizens are enraged.

In my home town, Josh Sutinen -- a seventeen-year-old who had only recently obtained his own driver's license -- successfully gathered enough voter signatures last spring to put the city's camera program to a referendum vote in November.

"These cameras are really just another big government attack on our rights," Sutinen said in an interview. "It's just taxation through citation."

The young man is enthusiastic and idealistic. I admire his interest in public affairs. But the question that comes to my mind is, exactly which "rights" is the government "attacking"?

The right to run a red light? The right to violate speed limits? The right of drivers to have a sporting chance of getting away with it when they don't see any cops around?

Frankly, I don't get it. In August, the local superior court ruled most of the referendum off the ballot, holding that repeal of traffic laws was not a proper use of referenda under state law. All that's left of the referendum is some sort of advisory vote on the issue. But similar binding measures remain on the ballot in at least two other Washington cities.

The town's mayor admits that he hadn't been all that enthusiastic about the use of cameras until he heard complaints from citizens about numerous speeding and red light violations.

The city began a one-year trial of the cameras this year, and Mayor Kurt Anagnostou said the program has made people more aware at intersections.

Sutinen is certainly aware. He avoids the traffic cameras at all costs, taking detours that extend his three-mile commute to five. Even before he had a driver's license, Sutinen said he hated the idea of the cameras and sought help from Eyman, who provided the initiative's wording.

Tim Eyman is a gentleman, notorious across the state, who has made the sponsoring of initiatives and referenda in Washington his profitable life's work. He has used the procedures to fight every tax and fee levied by state or local government, bringing the state to the point of budgetary crisis.

If it's illegal to run a red light, it's illegal regardless of whether a police officer catches you. If it's illegal to make a right turn on a red light without first coming to a full stop, it's illegal even if it's only a camera that observes your violation. If it's illegal, and you did it, I fail to see the difference between being caught by a police officer or being caught by a camera. In fact, the camera would generally be the more reliable witness.

The fact that it's profitable for the city to fine violators -- one of the battle cries of those opposing camera enforcement -- hardly seems relevant. We aren't talking about concealed speed traps. The location of cameras is announced by signage. The objective of the cameras and the announcement of their presence is to deter violations, not to profit from them.

If after paying the expenses of the program, the city still makes a profit from the fines -- so what? It's an ideal tax, from the taxpayer's perspective. You don't have to pay it. Just stop at red lights. And don't gun the engine when you see the light ahead of you turn yellow.

I've come close to being broadsided by an idiot who apparently thought red lights were advisory rather than mandatory, and who then failed to see my car approaching. Anything the government can do to deter and punish these idiots has my full support.

I offer my best wishes to the teenager who started the petition drive. He's clearly a great kid, no slacker, who has a lot of initiative (pun unintended) and enthusiasm. I hope he finds better projects in the future in which to pour his energy.
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Quotations taken from tdn.com

Dirty Harry's Balcony

2011-09-10T16:21:00.000-07:00

I sat on Dirty Harry's Balcony, and gazed down at the twin ribbons of I-90 as it headed toward Snoqualmie Pass.

No, not that "Dirty Harry," of course. Dirty Harry's the name given to a gyppo logger named Harry Gault, a guy famous in his day for building logging roads no one else would attempt and hauling out the timber. The name wasn't entirely a compliment, I gather.

As I sat here on his balcony -- a rocky ledge hanging over the valley -- this morning, I vowed to learn more about the gentleman as soon as I returned home. My own, barely-remembered grandfather was also a gyppo logger in his prime -- go in, throw up a sawmill, cut 'em down, haul 'em out, shut down the mill and get the hell out, leaving scalped hills and stump-littered meadows behind. In the course of his lifetime, he made and lost fortunes several times over. Unfortunately, like a Las Vegas gambler, he never quit while he was ahead.

I'm sure he would have rolled his eyes and splashed down a shot of bourbon if he'd known his eldest grandson would grow up to be a Sierra Club tree hugger.

Unfortunately, there isn't much to learn about Dirty Harry on-line. His story is told in passing by a number guidebooks and articles describing the hike to Dirty Harry's Peak. But they all seem to rely on each other as source material. I'm not even sure when Harry did his dirty work -- the source that sounds the most authoritative simply says that he logged the area "several decades ago." The lower part of the trail is now shaded by fairly mature second growth fir and cedar, so it's been a while since it was logged. The higher you hike, the more alder you encounter, suggesting that the higher areas were logged recently enough that evergreens have not yet taken over.

The trail today -- which is what has evolved from Harry's logging road -- forces some grudging respect for his efforts. During much of its length, it resembles nothing so much as a dry, rock-strewn creek bed, just waiting for the first rain to turn it into a raging torrent. The footing is difficult and the hiking is steep.

I climbed up to the "balcony," from which I took the photo above, and then another mile up the trail to Museum Creek. The creek is named after "Dirty Harry's Museum" -- the rusting remains of a large amount of logging equipment, including an entire logging truck. It's all back there in the forest somewhere, the hiking guides assure us, but they add that it is disappearing into the vegetation (like Angkor Wat, I suppose), and that many hikers waste a lot of time looking for it unsuccessfully. I admit, I didn't bother.

It would have been another mile horizontally and 2200 feet vertically from Museum Creed to Dirty Harry's Peak, but I called the creek my destination. My guidebook says that the peak is a high point on a forested ridge. It's difficult for a hiker to know when he's actually on the peak, and there's no panoramic view to reward his exertions. I'd had both my view of the valley and my history lesson. I was ready to pick my way back down the boulder field they call a "trail."

If Harry actually ever sat gazing out from his balcony -- I gather he wasn't much one for introspection and aesthetic appreciation -- his view would have been different from the multi-lane freeway that dominates the view today . Until the interstate highway system was built, cars followed the same route on a simple two-lane road (U.S. 10) through the Snoqualmie Valley and up over Snoqualmie Pass.

Going back to territorial days, the first wagon route was completed over the pass in 1867. Most passengers and freight crossed the pass by railroad, once the Northern Pacific finished tunneling and laying track in 1883, Apparently, some intrepid soul actually drove an automobile over the pass, using the rutted wagon road, in 1905. In 1915, the state constructed the "Sunset Highway" through the valley and over the pass, designated officially as State Highway 2. It became part of the U.S. Highway system, as U.S. 10, in 1926.

Under whichever name it was called, the road was slow, and eventually made slower by installation of traffic lights in the valley towns through which it passed, until I-90 was completed.

I'm not sure what Harry would think now, sitting on his balcony and watching the flow of traffic below. As long as he could get at those trees with his equipment, he probably wouldn't give a damn.
------------------------------
Photos, top to bottom:
Snoqualmie Valley and I-90 from Dirty Harry's Balcony
Sunset Highway, piercing the valley's then-dense forests, ca. 1915
Sunset Highway, switchbacks going over Snoqualmie Pass, ca. 1915

Bak 2 skul

2011-09-07T15:21:00.000-07:00

I strolled over to University Village around noon, basking in the mid-day sun as I walked, so I could pick up a book describing local hiking trails. (I have several such books already, but they tend to go out of date as fast as you can shout, "Forest clear cut!) I noticed something different, as I did so. No kids.

Nope, today's the first day of school. And I'm sure the bitter irony has not escaped notice by the young scholars.

As whiny earlier posts noted, Seattle was having a year without a summer. Actually, this is our second straight year with a sub-standard summer. But during the second half of August, the gods began to relent. The sun's been shining, the temperature's been hitting 80 most days, my lawn's all dried up. It's been beautiful.

When we get good weather from late August through September, it's a special treat. The sun may be blazing, but not with a white heat; it lights up the scenery with an autumnal golden glow, as it moves farther each day to the south. Even when the temperatures reaches the low 80's, and the sun feels hot upon my skin, the air feels slightly cooler and less humid than it would have earlier in the summer. The temperature drops into the low 50's each night, even after a very warm day, so my bedroom's comfortable while I sleep. There's a pleasant chill to the air when I get up in the morning.

A chill that's agreeable, because I see the sun coming up and know it's going to be another great, warm, sunny day. It's a morning chill that doesn't preclude my donning shorts and a t-shirt in anticipation of the day to come.

Which brings us back to the students. Their school vacation is ending after nearly three months, of which only the last couple of weeks was anything like proper summer weather. They trudge off to school as the hot sun rises in the sky. They see the ten-day forecast in the newspaper, with a bright yellow sun marking each coming day. And they feel cheated.

And they may well be. I've always wondered why schools in the Northwest don't close from July through September. June is usually rainy around here; September is usually one of our nicest months. The University doesn't re-open until the last Monday of September. That makes sense.

But, meanwhile, the public school kids are learning a valuable lesson they've no doubt heard about before: No one ever said life is fair!

Accepting uncertainty

2011-08-31T18:48:00.000-07:00

The mass media rarely carry articles dealing with religion in a truly thoughtful manner. Insofar as they deal with religion at all, newspapers are more apt either to discuss sensational religious events ("Rapture didn't happen; we're all still here!), or to provide comfort to the religiously comfortable ("President lights up White House Christmas tree!").

Last week, however, USA Today ran an interesting feature article based on the thought of physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne. Polkinghorne's work in the field of elementary particles led him to play a role in the discovery of quarks, and he has conducted advanced theoretical research in other areas.¹ Theoretical mathematicians and physicists typically do their most important work by the age of 30. When Polkinghorne felt his best work had been done, he began studies for ordination to the priesthood.

But the USA Today article focused less on his unusual combination of vocations, and more upon his thoughts concerning doubt and uncertainty. No one has ever seen a quark, the article noted. We "believe" in them because their supposed existence is necessary to make sense of the empirical data. The existence of quarks has not been "proved." In fact, no scientific theory is ever proved -- including evolution, as fundamentalists like to point out. If new data suggest a better theoretical model, scientists of course reconsider their "beliefs."

Similarly, Polkinghorne points out, we don't have empirical evidence of God's existence. The traditional "proofs" offered for the existence of God suggest reasons to believe, but do not constitute mathematical or logical proofs.

In other contexts, Polkinghorne has pointed to scientific or cosmological evidence that make belief in God reasonable, or even compelling, but the evidence does not logically demand belief in God's existence.

As we go through life, we are constantly forced to believe or not believe in logically possible conclusions based on our judgment of the conflicting strengths of the evidence and the repercussions resulting from making the wrong judgment. If we don't "believe" in global warming and so ignore it, for example, what are the consequences of being wrong?

Polkinghorne says that, as a thinking person, he naturally considers the possibility that God and Christianity could be human inventions with no basis in reality.

"It's [i.e., belief in God] a reasonable position, but not a knock-down argument," he said. "It's strong enough to bet my life on it. Just as Polanyi² bet his life on his belief, knowing that it might not be true, I give my life to it, but I'm not certain. Sometimes I'm wrong."

Quarks may be a fiction. Fossil evidence of dinosaurs may have been planted in the ground by a capricious God to lead prideful men to question Genesis. The universe, as I discussed in an earlier post, may have been a child's toy -- like a model train set -- cobbled together by a young super being, a toy that he left running after he went off to college. The world we observe by our senses may even be the dream of some Matrix-like pod people.

But based on the evidence known to him and on his life experiences, Polkinghorne has made a conscious decision to accept the existence of God and the message of Christianity, and to base his life on that decision. As Christian doctrine traditionally holds, belief in Christ would not be meritorious if it were forced on us by logic. Christian belief is not contrary to logic, but the merit adheres in our voluntary decision to assent to its message of love and to live our lives in accordance with that message.

Polkinghorne's own message goes beyond these age-old arguments between atheists and theists, however. If even devout Christians such as Polkinghorne are forced to admit the logical possibility of being wrong, how much more should those of us dealing with the more mundane, human questions of politics be willing to admit at all times that we know nothing with certainty, that our political and economic convictions are merely hopeful theories, and that we may well be thinking and acting in error.

Oliver Cromwell's exclamation to the Scottish church, "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken," applies to all facets of life. John Polkinghorne, Ph.D., professor of mathematical physics at Cambridge, President of Queen's College (Cambridge), and Canon Theologian of Liverpool Cathedral has issued our world a call for intellectual and emotional humility, a reminder that there is little if anything in our universe about which we can claim absolute certainty.

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¹He has "researched the analytic and high-energy properties of Feynman integrals and the foundations of S-Matrix theory," according to Wikipedia.

²"Michael Polanyi (March 11, 1891 – February 22, 1976) was a Hungarian–British polymath, who made important theoretical contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and the theory of knowledge. In his philosophical writings he argued that positivism not only gives a false account of the practice of science, it also, if taken seriously, undermines our highest achievements as human beings."
--Wikipedia

Camp Muir

2011-08-28T10:15:00.000-07:00

If you're looking for a day hike that will give you some of the most incredible views available in the Pacific Northwest, as well as fully test your endurance, head for Camp Muir.

Camp Muir is the staging point for 90 percent of the summit climbs of Mt. Rainier, including those run by the Park's official guide service. After struggling from the roadhead at Paradise (5,400 ft.) up to Camp Muir (10,080 ft.), carrying 40 pound packs, you "enjoy" a few hours of sleep on wooden shelves inside a crowded, noisy shelter, built in 1921 and never redecorated, before being roused at about 11 p.m. to begin the climb to the summit (14,411 ft.)

But Camp Muir itself makes a nice day hike destination. I gave it a try yesterday, partly for the scenery, partly to help condition myself for my Nepal trek in October.

As those of us in the Northwest Corner are all too aware, we had a heavy snow pack this past year, and -- until the last two or three weeks -- an unusually cool summer. As a result, even the labyrinth of paths that the Park Service provides for car tourists -- paved in asphalt and designed to let families wander up above Paradise Lodge without too much effort, giving them an opportunity to view the wild flowers and wildlife -- remain covered by snow fields in many places. These paths are usually free of snow by mid-July. But the snow fields on these lower slopes aren't steep, and have foot paths etched into them, so the tourists were still out in force. A major attraction this year, one that I've never noticed before in this area, was a large number of large and unintimidated marmots, rolling and frolicking about beside the trail like a bunch of playful kittens.

The paths become more ambitious and dedicated to leading hikers to specific destinations once you reach a couple hundred vertical feet above the Lodge. The highest point reachable by trail is Pebble Creek, at 7,200 feet. Once past the creek, you find yourself on the Muir snowfield, a massive, undulating field of year-round snow that continues unrelentingly upward, all the way to the buildings at Camp Muir. While the trail to Pebble Creek is fun to walk for a number of reasons, the snowfield beyond is simply a long, exhausting slog. You do it because you have to, if you're a summit climber, or, for hikers, because you've told yourself that Camp Muir shall be the day's destination. The scenery becomes ever more spectacular, of course, as you climb higher -- but I suspect that scenery watching and photography become for most hikers mainly excuses to catch one's breath. That was certainly true for me, at least.

After you hang out for a while at the Camp, scoping out the views and perhaps feeling somewhat envious of those who are there for the summit climb, there remains the descent. I had departed from Paradise somewhat later in the day that I'd intended, and didn't start down until after 4 p.m. The snow was starting to ice in places, which made the descent less carefree -- and slower -- than I had hoped. (A number of falls, painful only to my dignity.) Also, I was wearing shorts, which made seat-of-the-pants glissades, a popular activity in the steep areas, not really feasible. I envied a large group of Indian or Indian-American tourists who had brought plastic garbage bags with them for use as sleds. They were descending more swiftly, and with a lot more noisy fun, than was I.

But the scenery was magnificent on a bright sunny day, and the temperature was moderate so that the hiking was comfortable. I took a bunch of great photos. And my muscles and cardiovascular system certainly got the workout I'd hoped for. Four hours up, and two and a half hours down. A highly satisfying day.

Rubus fruticosus

2011-08-24T09:56:00.000-07:00

When I moved to my present house, the city block on which it's located was essentially one large plantation of blackberries. Each back yard was a space carved out of this plantation -- space stolen from the domain of the Mother Bramble, if you will. Where many city blocks might have an alley, we on 26th Avenue were separated from the houses behind us on 25th by a tangle of blackberry vines, growing on lots facing both streets, a tangle that towered above us. The Mother Bramble also shot out extensions, like pseudopods, between adjacent lots as well, so that my backyard was protected on three sides by walls of barbed vines.

Fences make good neighbors, but we had no need for wooden fences. We had our blackberries. And our "fences," unlike those built of sterile cedar planks, produced fruit. Quite tasty fruit, especially about this time of year.

But change came to the 'hood. More and more upward-aspirational techies and professionals moved in. The alluring photos in Sunset magazine didn't show back yards surrounded by blackberry vines, and Sunset magazine (or some more upscale version thereof) was the garden bible for the new immigrants.

I've always regretted the felling of the great American forest by the pioneers and those who came after. Something similar happened around these parts, as homeowner after homeowner cut his way deeper and deeper into the blackberry jungle. I'm not entirely immune from peer pressure, although more immune, perhaps, than my neighbors would prefer. I, too, eventually hired workers to root out my blackberries, to sanitize my backyard, to show myself as a civilized man in a civiized neighborhood.

The blackberries were gone, but, like Adam and Eve after the Fall, we now felt ourselves naked. The fellow next door quickly hid himself from his neighbors by building a fence around his yard to replace the blackberry barriers. I countered his starkly utilitarian fence, shielding it from my view, by planting a laurel hedge. My yard now appears reasonably tidied up. Just like everyone else's.

I have met the enemy, and he be me.

But there's a postscript. Blackberries don't surrender gracefully. They may concede the battle, but not the war. In corners of my yard, they spring back to life whenever my back is turned. Before I really notice, they begin reasserting themselves with renewed vigor, claiming territory as theirs by right. Just as the medieval church discovered, the battle against heresy is never won, because heresy always raises its ugly head when vigilance is relaxed.

And like a new convert to orthodoxy, my horror at each reappearance of blackberry vines exceeds the bounds of reason. I've been inspecting my backyard each morning with pruning shears in hand, ready to cut down each timid blackberry sprout as it emerges from the soil. My strategy is psychological -- the hope that I can convince the blackberries that resistance is futile, that they will be utterly destroyed the moment they appear above ground.

Punishment does not take place primarily and per se for the correction and good of the person punished, but for the public good in order that others may become terrified and weaned away from the evils they would commit

as the 1578 handbook of the Inquisition so adroitly phrased it.

Soon, I shall have extirpated the species entirely from my domain, and will live in a totally domesticated and controlled environment, with only those plants authorized by the editors of Sunset growing in my closely watched soil. I have conquered not only the wiles of Rubus fruticosus , but also my own earlier weakness and unhealthy tolerance of heterodoxy.

I think I'll celebrate by going to Safeway and buying a $4.99 carton of blackberries to heap on my mornng cereal.

Kidnapped

2011-08-22T15:17:00.000-07:00

Some people, after returning from a first trip to Hawaii, can't resist reading James Michener's novel about the Islands. Or they visit Paris, and come home to read Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. Within a week of my return from Scotland, I found myself rummaging through my childhood books for my copy of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped.

I read Kidnapped as a boy -- my folks had bought it for me along with Treasure Island as a matched set -- and, as I recall, it seemed kind of boring at the time. I read it several years ago as an adult, and found it more captivating. But after visiting Scotland -- having hiked in and about many of the same regions described in the book -- the novel is infinitely more interesting.

Kidnapped is a first-person tale narrated by a Scots teenager from a small town near Edinburgh. The plot is simple. In 1751, David Balfour, having lost both his parents, is cheated out of his inheritance by his uncle, who essentially sells him into slavery to work in the tobacco fields in the American colonies. He is shanghaied aboard a sailing ship, and the first half of the book describes life -- and David's horror and despair -- aboard ship. The ship is wrecked in the Hebrides, off the Isle of Mull. David survives and allies himself with a Highlander named Alan Breck Stewart, a real historical figure.

David and Alan are present when a Campbell clansman -- the Campbells being a clan that willingly acted as agents of the Crown in seizing the property of members of the dissident clans -- was shot and killed upon the highway. The so-called Appin Murder was a national sensation. Warrants were issued for the arrest of both David and his older companion on charges of murder and accessory to murder. The remainder of the story describes their grueling escape from the authorities by way of a circuitous path through the Highlands, back to Edinburgh. It ends with David's being restored to his inheritance.

After an awkward and halting farewell, David walks away into the glittering and busy streets of Edinburgh, well-dressed, with a prosperous life lying ahead. He leaves Alan in hiding, facing a dangerous sail for France, his sole hope for avoiding the noose. David is a well to do Lowlander; Alan, whose unwavering friendship kept David alive, is a dispossessed and despised Highlander.¹

I let the crowd carry me to and fro; and yet all the time what I was thinking of was Alan at Rest-and-be-Thankful; and all the time (although you would think I would not choose but be delighted with these braws and novelties)there was a cold gnawing in my inside like a remorse for something wrong.

The novel was serialized in a boys' magazine in 1886, but has always appealed to adults as well as kids. David, a reserved and conscientious "Whig" Lowlander, and Alan, a flamboyantly argumentative Jacobite Highlander, learn to appreciate each other's strengths and overlook each other's weaknesses. The story is satisfyingly biased in favor of the Highlander cause, and the book forces us, and ultimately even David, to root against the English authorities and the quisling Campbell clan.

What's fascinating to me -- aside from the vivid portrayal of one version of real historical events -- is the description of the same countryside that I visited some 260 years later, and of the lives and personalities of the people who inhabited it. Stevenson has his Highland characters speak in dialect when they're speaking English (or Scots, as the dialect is called), as opposed to Gaelic. The author said later that he had anglicized the Scots dialect somewhat to make it more readable, and my edition has a few footnotes defining unfamiliar terms; even so, I suspect that the language would pose a challenge to many kids reading it today.

In fact, the book is impressively sophisticated in language, description, motivation, and characterization, compared with much of what passes as Young Adult fiction -- e.g., vampire books -- today. The long days aboard ship, and the difficulties of hiking secretly through the bracken and heather of the wild Highlands rarely elicit sudden bursts of adrenaline,² as more modern readers may demand, but rather paint a picture, layer by layer, of the dangers and hardships of life and politics in 18th century Scotland, and the growth of a friendship between two protagonists from opposite backgrounds.

With that caveat, Kidnapped is worth reading for anyone, young or adult, who has an interest in history, and in the traditional life of the Scottish Highlands.

------------------------

¹Historically, Alan Breck Stewart was tried in absentia and sentenced to hang. He was never hanged, but no record exists as to his life after leaving Scotland. His father was tried in person as an accessory to the murder. Although no evidence was produced that the father intended the murder or had any part in it, he was convicted by a jury of Campbells and a Campbell judge, and was hanged. Recent historical studies have absolved both Alan and his father of any guilt in the killing. (David, of course, is a wholly fictional character.)

²Although the chapter in which David and Alan singlehandedly mutiny and seize control of the ship headed for the Colonies -- shortly before it runs onto a reef and is wrecked -- is exciting by anyone's standard.

Folksy writing

2011-08-21T10:08:00.000-07:00

My blog's "mission statement" asserts my intent that it be "An exercise in careful writing, traditional grammar and tidy penmanship." And yet my posts are often replete with sentence fragments, slangy terms and unanswerable rhetorical questions.

So what's with that?

In an essay in today's New York Times Magazine, Maud Newton deplores the sloppy conventions, the "folksiness," of today's internet writing in general and of blog composition in particular. She spends much of her essay ascribing today's stylistic morass to the writings of David Foster Wallace, the author whose essay "Consider the Lobster" received extravagant worship from me in an earlier blog posting.

She dislikes Wallace's "second guessing" -- by which she means Wallace's frequent acknowlegement that his own point of view is not without weakness -- and his rapid alternation between formal speech and slacker slang. As example, she presents his felicitous phrase, "hard not to sort of almost actually like," which of course incorporates both "second-guessing" and slacker slang, along with a dollop of equally deplorable self-irony.

In fairness, Newton recognizes that Wallace had a brilliant mind and that his unfortunate style was part of his appeal. What she really hates is how his style has been adopted unreflectively by bloggers of lesser skills and intelligence.

Like me.

Like Newton, I've spent many years engaged in legal writing. And together with Newton, when I write professionally, I agree that the

idea is to provoke and persuade, not to soothe. And the best way to make an argument is to make it straightforwardly, honestly, passionately, without regard to whether people will like you afterward.

But when I do write a brief, my sole purpose is to persuade a judge that no reasonable person could disagree with my argument. I write only to persuade, not to entertain, and not to muse together with my reader on the complexities of life.

This blog is something of an escape from years of legal writing. I write partly to force myself to think clearly about issues I find interesting. I write partly to persuade, just as I do as a lawyer, but also partly to acknowledge that every point of view, including my own, has both merits and weaknesses, and to invite whomever stumbles upon my blog to think for himself.

And, sure -- I write to entertain. To entertain myself as I write -- an admitted self-indulgence -- and to entertain, or at least interest, my readers.

Newton's essay is interesting, and worth considering. There is, in fact, a tendency among modern writers to shun formality, and to write in the same casual manner as we speak. This tendency can be overdone, and the result can be not merely an informal style, but an irritating lack of clarity in expression.

But the writer needs to consider the purpose of his writing. If expressing an argument or fact with clarity is less important than conveying a mood or observing the humor in some quirk of life, the style of writing should -- or, at least, may -- reflect this purpose.

So yeah. What y'all think of that, huh?

Beyond barbarism

2011-08-19T08:55:00.000-07:00

One way to identify a primitive society is by its tendency to judge all issues -- political and ethical -- in terms of black and white. Hence, the concept of "taboo" or "kapu," a Polynesian word that also applies to the codes of most early societies. Think, for example, of the lengthy list of absolute prohibitions set forth in the Book of Leviticus.

But religious taboos are merely one aspect -- and not that important an aspect -- of what we might call Manichean thought processes. In 18th century England, theft of a shilling or more was a felony, and whether the judge liked it or not, there was only one penalty for felonies -- hanging. Many a ten-year-old pickpocket found himself strangling at the end of a rope. For whatever cultural or psychological reasons, Republicans even today seem to have a similar -- if less gruesome -- mindset, and a strong aversion to viewing political issues as presenting varying shades of gray. ("No new taxes, whatever the consequences," for example.)

President Obama announced today that he is directing Homeland Security to focus its attention on deporting those illegal immigrants with criminal records who pose a danger to national security or public safety, and to ease up on others -- students and college graduates, especially, who were brought illegally as children to this country. Fox News headlined the President's announcement: "GOP: Obama Giving Free Pass to Illegal Immigrants." Republicans denounced the action as "backdoor amnesty"; the Republican governor of Arizona said Obama was enacting the so-called Dream Act "by executive fiat."¹

I still remember the case of Rigoberto Padilla. Padilla was brought here illegally from Mexico by his parents when he was six years old. He had lived in Illinois, never returning to Mexico even for a visit. He graduated from high school with a 3.5 GPA, and, while working full time, was a full time honors student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was also president of a Latino student organization. He planned to attend law school and become an attorney. He was stopped for a minor traffic offense, his immigration status was discovered, and he was given four months to return voluntarily to Mexico -- a country he knew nothing about -- or be deported.²

"He is now going to pay for the sins of his parents, really, and we cannot be making special exceptions for him," said a right-wing activist opposing illegal immigration.

Simple question of black or white.

"No Amnesty" has been the mantra of right-wing opponents to any easing of the immigration laws. Deport them all, they demand, every one of the millions of undocumented immigrants, no matter how long they have been here, no matter how valuable their lives have been to their communities. Their presence somehow is an affront to those of us who, despite having spent our lives sitting slack-jawed before our TV sets, are nevertheless more deserving of this country's amenities, because we happen to have been born here.

Fortunately, the legal system recognizes the concept of "prosecutorial discretion" -- a concept that reflects the realization that we will never have enough prosecutors or judges to charge and convict every offender against every law on the books. The concept also recognizes that not every technical statutory violation should be prosecuted, even if the resources to do so were available -- in too many cases, the damage to the offender would far outweigh any advantage to the community.

President Obama's guidelines to Homeland Security direct a sensible and compassionate exercise of such prosecutorial discretion.

The ability to weigh offenses on a case by case basis -- both by the prosecutor in deciding whether to charge the offense, and by the courts in determining the proper penalty upon conviction -- reflects our development from a rigid, primitive society to a humane and more reflective community. In other words, our progress beyond barbarism to a tenous status of civilization.

We don't automatically stone wizards, nowadays. (Lev. 20:27) We first ask for more details, and see if there aren't better ways to resolve the problem.

------------------------

Photo: Rigoberto Padilla at press conference

¹Interestingly enough, however, over 64 percent of Fox News readers (as of 8-19-11 at 11 a.m. PDT) voted approval for emphasizing deportation of criminals rather than of illegal immigrants in general.

As of 2:00 p.m., over 69 percent were favoring the President's position. And Fox had dropped the entire story out of headline treatment.

²At the last minute, after a public outcry, his deportation was deferred for at least one year.

Land of dreams

2011-08-15T08:45:00.000-07:00

Over the past two weeks, while the American economy was falling prey to the dysfunctional American political system, and while the cities of Britain were being burned by hopeless youths, I was hiking obliviously and happily through the Highlands of Scotland.

I've described my anticipated route in past blog postings. The scenery along the trail was beautiful every step of the way, from the pastoral suburbs of Glasgow, past the calm, fjord-like waters of Loch Lomond, into the Highlands, weaving through the crags and bogs of Rannoch Moor, down into the valley of Glen Coe, and back up over a final lobe of Rannoch Moor and down into Fort William.

The predicted rain fell, although not day by day, hour by hour. I had three days during which fairly steady rain fell during at least part of the hiking day: Day 2 approaching Loch Lomond; Day 5 approaching Inveroran on the edge of Rannoch Moor; and the final day, climbing out of Kinlochlevan across moors and mountains to Fort William. It was on that final day that I confronted the steadiest rain, a rain that obscured what was billed as the most beautiful mountain scenery of the hike. I hiked for miles on gully-like trails that flowed with running water as though they were creek beds, being repeatedly forced to find a way across the "burns," or small streams, that flowed across the trail every few hundred feet or so. But then, I'm a Northwest Corner hiker -- not unaccustomed to moisture -- and was able to take that in stride. And I did have appropriate rain gear.

Each day's hike, although usually lengthy, was reasonably gentle, and the trail was extremely well maintained. For a significant portion of the hike, I was hiking on abandoned military roads from the 18th century, roads so well built that they remain in excellent condition and have required little maintenance. My longest day's hike was 18 miles on Day 2, three miles longer than advertised because of a wrong turn I took in extremely heavy rainfall. This misadventure, together with another mistake on Day 4 that led me to make an unnecessary steep climb into the hills, wasting 1½ hours, reflect little credit on the author's navigational skills. Further discussion on this topic, therefore, will not be tolerated.

Midges? A few bites the last three days of the hike, despite my purchase and use of Smidge^®, a Scottish concoction designed specifically to battle the midge threat, but the tiny bugs certainly didn't present a serious problem. I've had worse experiences with mosquitoes right here in the good old US of A.

Why hike in Scotland, when we have beautiful trails on which to hike here at home? I sensed that question in the minds of some of the Scots with whom I talked. And if you're looking just for pretty scenery and good trails, the question has a certain validity.

To me, however, there's the additional appeal of historical and literary allusions: Celtic myth, warring clans, Jacobite rebellions against the English, reivers and highwaymen, Rob Roy, Sir Walter Scott. I've also had a strong yearning, ever since childhood, to walk unknown paths shrouded in mists and myth -- that fairy world that makes up so much of Yeats's poetry, perhaps, or the mysterious empty lands of Tolkien's writings. The popularity of the LOTR books and movies surely indicates that I'm not alone in this yearning, in this peculiar need to visit, however briefly, worlds somehow pre-modern in their strangeness and scant population.

Thus, poring over my maps in the months before the hike, I foresaw Loch Lomond as it really is -- a beautiful lake with many historical associations, but also a lake that serves as a recreational area for the urban residents of Edinburgh and Glasgow. But north of the lake, the trail would leave the modern world, in my imagining, and wend its way into the world of romance. I would cross the Bridge of Orchy, an ancient landmark in the wilderness marking the entrance to the moors of the North. A bridge that I somehow associated with Tolkien's Last Bridge, crossing the River Bruinen. I saw myself fighting off Dark Riders in front of me, while defending against trolls attacking my flanks.

The trail enters Rannoch Moor, crossing vast reaches of bog and grasslands -- a playground for Macbeth's witches, for hobgoblins and will-o'-the-wisps -- skirting the base of dark hills with darker names: Beínn Toaig and Meall a'Bhùiridh, Beíenn a'Chrulaiste and Buachaille Etive Mor. It leads down to the isolated Kingshouse Hotel, an ancient establishment that's been greeting travelers, smugglers and cattle drovers for over two centuries, an inn that recalled -- again, in the fevered imaginings of my mind -- Tolkien's "Prancing Pony" inn at Bree. The trail leaves "Bree" behind, and climbs back up to the moor by the sixteen switchbacks of the Devil's Staircase, thence descending into the isolated lochside village of Kinlochleven.

I would be wandering in a land of enchantment.

Now, despite your impression, I'm not an idiot. I know I live in the 21st century. I know that the fairies and goblins have long since been chased from Scotland. But it's possible to think on two levels simultaneously, right? Staring at the map, my rational mind clearly observed that the trail rarely wanders far from the A82 tourist road that runs from Glasgow, north to Fort William, and on to Inverness. But on my trail map, the A82 is merely a faint line, less prominant than the bright red line of the West Highland Way trail. The secret of a successful Scottish hike -- for me -- was to likewise subordinate the sights and sounds of that irritating A82 to the romantic imaginings of my own mind while I was actually on the trail.

This I'm fully capable of doing.

I sometimes think that everything is fiction and that travel is something that happens in your head.
--Paul Theroux

Exactly, Mr. Theroux. Exactly.

So it was a great hike. Wonderful exercise. Dazzling scenery. And eight days walking through mysterious regions where, at any moment, I might have encountered a Celtic sprite, a masked highwayman, a MacDonald or Campbell dressed for battle, a Brigadoon wedding.

I didn't, actually, of course. But what I did see, and even what I only dreamed, was far more enjoyable than watching the nosedive of the American economy and the rioting in English cities. Thanks, Scotland! I'll be back again some day.

-----------------------------------

Photos on Facebook can be seen by clicking here.

Publication suspended

2011-07-30T16:08:00.000-07:00

Finally. Summer has arrived in the Northwest Corner. The sun is bright. The sky is blue. The temperatures are in the high 70's. The breezes are soft and gentle, caressing lightly my arms, legs and face, as I stroll down the sidewalk in shorts and t-shirt.

Seattle at its finest: a summer paradise, short in duration, but generous in its gifts.

Well then! I guess it must be time to go hiking in the Scottish Highlands! Take a look at that ten-day forecast. Yes sir, that's one day of partial sunshine. Does this kid know how to pick 'em? And the midge forecast! -- for indeed there is a Scots webpage ominously reporting the midge forecast -- it's for high levels of biting midges, reaching their highest intensity in Glen Coe, a valley through which I'll be hiking. Silly Yank -- look at him trying to admire the scenery while desperately warding off rain and midge.

So be it. The Northwest Corner now shuts down for vacation break. Come back in mid-August, and see what's on its insane publisher's mind. Learn how his diluvial, rain-sodden hike actually worked out in practice.

(I'm kidding -- I'm gonna have fun, no matter how rebarbative the weather conditions may be!)

An icy mountain

2011-07-27T16:27:00.000-07:00

To the north, beyond the main range of the Himalayas, emerging from the Tibetan plateau, stands an isolated peak called Kailas. Although only 22,028 feet high, quite low by Himalayan standards, no climber has ever stood on its summit (except, apocryphally, a mystic in ancient times). It may never be climbed.

Kailas is a holy mountain to a number of religions, including Hinduism and Buddhism.

To Hindus, Kailas is identified as the earthly manifestation of the mystical mountain Meru. Living on the summit are Lord Shiva, and his consort Parvati.

To Tibetan Buddhists, atop Kailas is the ice palace of Demchog, a demonic deity wearing a crown of skulls -- perhaps a manifestation of Shiva -- who is usually represented with a blue-skinned body, four faces, and twelve arms, and shown embracing his consort Vajravarahi. Demchog and his consort are locked in an erotic embrace, representing the union of "nothingness" and "compassion."

To the remaining adherents of Bön, the pre-Buddhist belief system of Tibet, Kailas represented the seat of all spiritual power.

Colin Thubron is a travel writer in his early 70's. Over his lifetime, he has written a number of well-received books describing his travels in Asia and the Middle East, beginning with publication in 1967 of his book, Mirror to Damascus. In recent years, he's watched his family die off, one by one. The death of his mother, the last survivor of his family, prompted him to undertake a trek to Kailas, leading to publication this year of his book, To a Mountain in Tibet.

If Eric Newby's book, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (discussed a couple of posts ago) was a young man's light-hearted treatment of a taxing and dangerous climbing and trekking expedition, Thubron writes as a much older man, stricken by the deaths of relatives and facing his own mortality. The trek is not easy, but it follows well known trails; Western trekking companies routinely lead treks to the holy mountain. Thubron's trek is far less a perilous adventure into the unknown than was Newby's.

But Thubron's pilgrimage results is a far darker book.

Thubron begins trekking in the far western region of Nepal. He walks over passes through the Himalayas, crosses into Tibet, and arrives ultimately at the foot of Kailas. He then undertakes the kora, the traditional Buddhist and Hindu circumambulation of the mountain, an exercise that will wipe one's soul free of sin. For those with the tenacity to complete 108 circuits during their lifetime, the cycle of reincarnation comes immediately to an end, and the soul enters nirvana.

Few beliefs are older than the notion that heaven and earth were once conjoined, and that gods and men moved up and down a celestial ladder -- or a rope or vine -- and mingled at ease.

Kailas is such a ladder. The mountain was flown to this remote area, according to Buddhist belief, staked in place before devils could pull it underground, and nailed in place by the Buddha himself, preventing the gods from returning it to its origin.

Thubron speaks with many Nepalis and Tibetans on his trek. They are usually friendly. Their lives are very difficult, and often short. Many have suffered at the hands of the Chinese Maoists. Whatever dreams they may one day have dreamt as children rarely survived their teens. Only their religious beliefs give apparent meaning to the limited number of years and opportunities allotted them.

Thubron describes in detail, throughout his trek, the cosmic views held by Buddhists (and to a lesser degree, Hindus). He looks for that same meaning. He longs also to believe.

But he views the beliefs he lovingly describes as an outsider; he sees them as myths that -- however beautiful and suggestive -- were evolved by a primitive civilization. He marvels at the quiet self-confidence of monks with whom he meets; but he asks himself, are they incredibly wise, or simply credulous? Scholarly, or lazy? Are the desperately poor Nepali and Tibetans whom he meets making their way through just one more incarnation on the road to ultimate enlightenment? Or are they leading short, desperate, meaningless lives, ending in wretched deaths.

Thubron completes the 32-mile circuit of Kailas, crossing over its high point, Dröma pass, at 18,200 feet. He feels a sense of accomplishment, but he attains no spiritual revelation, no peace.

The writhing image of Demchog -- the union of "nothingness" and "compassion" -- leaves him neither at peace with his mother's death, nor at ease contemplating his own. A Buddhist monk, in the Tibetan tradition, explains to him that, in reality, there are no gods. Or rather, that the gods are merely guides, helping to lead him to that enlightenment that is man's highest destiny.

I tried to imagine this, but the wrong words swam into my mind: rejected life, self-hypnosis, the obliteration of loved difference. Premature death.

He tells a monk that his understanding of Buddhism is that, at death, everything is shed.

He smiled, as he tended to do at contradiction. "That is so. Only karma lasts. Merit and demerit."
"So nothing of the individual survives. Nothing that contains memory?"
"No." He sensed the strain in me, and with faint regret: "You know our Buddhist saying?"
Yes, I remember.
From all that he loves, man must part.

Thubron has undertaken a fascinating adventure. He has written yet another excellent book. I doubt, however, that he came down from his mountain having achieved the wisdom, the peace, or the hope that he may have sought on its heights. Demchog, in his amalgam of compassion and nothingness, may appear to Western eyes a cruel god.
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Photo: Demchok, enthroned upon Mt. Kailas

Hoisted with his own petard

2011-07-26T10:51:00.000-07:00

A young coyote, his head stuck in a plastic jar, is wandering around south Seattle, drawing tons of attention from the media.

The coyote apparently found something attractive about the jar. Once he got his head into it, however, he couldn't pull it back out. He's been stuck in his self-inflicted trap for about ten days, floundering around the countryside irrationally. He can't eat or drink.

The jar obviously distorts his view of the world, but so far he's eluded capture. He's terrified of the animal experts who are his only hope of extrication before he dies of thirst and hunger.

Time may be running out for the young pup.

Meanwhile, he's causing a lot of commotion and a lot of anxiety in the community.

Turning now to national news, let's look at the Republicans in Congress ....

Newby in Nuristan

2011-07-24T16:07:00.000-07:00

By 1956, Eric Newby had devoted ten years of his life to working as a dress buyer for a London fashion house. Then one day, he received a telegram from Hugh Carless, a casual friend, asking "CAN YOU TRAVEL NURISTAN JUNE?"

Nuristan -- which until 1896, when its people were forcibly converted to Islam, had been called Kafiristan (land of the infidels) -- is one of the most remote and backward provinces in Afghanistan, nestled in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, northeast of Kabul. Afghanistan itself, at the time, was a nation so primitive that it had virtually no paved roads. Carless suggested not only exploring Nuristan, but also bagging a first ascent of near-by Mir Samir (19,878 ft.).

Newby of course said "yes," walking away from his career in the fashion industry. And thus was born his best-selling travel adventure, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.

Although Newby's life to that point had been a bit more adventuresome than his account of it suggests -- distinguished military service, and shipping out as an 18-year-old apprentice on a four-masted sailing vessel carrying grain as cargo between Europe and Australia -- neither Carless nor he had any mountaineering experience. To prepare for their adventure, they took a short course in elementary techniques from some experienced climbers, mountaineers who appeared concerned not only for the pair's safety but also for their sanity.

Newby writes in a humorous, self-deprecating and understated style about their efforts to properly outfit themselves and prepare for what he increasingly realized would be a totally foolhardy ordeal. The early chapters read like "Laurel and Hardy Go Mountaineering." Carless appears insouciant and confident; Newby was in a constant state of panic and alarm.

Their travel cross-country from Europe to Kabul was in itself the adventure of a lifetime. Once past Kabul, and on the trail up into the Hindu Kush, Newby's account becomes less manically funny and more humorously observant of the real dangers and problems they encountered. Newby's feet were blistered and in bandages from the outset, and both suffered from chronic dysentary. The local helpers whom they had secured in Kabul were difficult to deal with, often obdurate and unwilling to do what was asked of them, and difficult to communicate with. (Carless did speak Persian, of which the local languages were variants or dialects; Newby spoke only English.) The pack horses were in poor condition, and often terrified by the trail they were forced to follow.

Despite unspeakable hardships, primitive food rations, and unfriendly villagers, the two adventurers dragged themselves up higher and higher into the Hindu Kush. Facing miseries that would cause many experienced climbers to give up, and needing to pull out a sort of "Climbing for Dummies" manual whenever they confronted a technical challenge, they somehow managed to reach a point just 700 vertical feet below the summit of Mir Samir. They could have continued successfully to the summit but for the lateness in the day and their lack of any equipment for an overnight bivouac -- even turning around at that point, they returned to their camp after dark.

Rather than then returning to England, tails between their legs, they proceeded onward with a difficult climb over a mountain ridge and down into the next valley, thus passing into Nuristan. They had a number of adventures among a people so isolated that they thought Newby and Carless must be Russians, with whom they were familiar as rifle salesmen -- and so wild and incomprensible that Newby feared they must be mad.

The book comes with a sketchy map, hand-drawn by the author, on which the reader can follow a dotted line marking Newby's route. The map, indeed the entire trek, brings to mind Frodo's quest in Lord of the Rings. Although no orcs or dwarves come bounding out of any of the many caves Newby and Carless pass, their adventure is odd enough, and divorced enough from how we picture the world of 1956, that we would hardly have been surprised. Newby even happens upon a faded inscription carved into stone in an unknown tongue -- strangely reminiscent of Tolkien's elvish runes.

Until I had read Newby's book, I'd never heard of Nuristan, despite the fact that the remote valley was the core sanctuary of the Afghan opponents to the Russian occupation in the 1980's. We think of Afghanistan as a bleak, ugly country filled with murderous fanatics. But before the Russian invasion in 1979, Afghanistan was a popular stop on the "hippie highway" to India. Newby's book reminds us of how beautiful and undeveloped much of Afghanistan remains, and of how primitive and isolated many of its people were as late as the Eisenhower era. And, for all I know, may still be.

Afghanistan as a tourist (or trekking) destination may seem improbable any time in the near future. It wasn't so long ago, however, that Americans felt the same way about Vietnam.
----------------------------------
Photo: Eric Newby climbing Mir Samir

Ruddigore

2011-07-23T09:23:00.000-07:00

A witch burning at the stake. A cursed baronetcy. An old woman long ago driven mad by scorned affection. A gothic castle. Thunder and lightning. Bewitched paintings whose portraits step out from their frames. A black and red caped villain, sweeping about the stage like the alligators in Fantasia. A jaunty sailor, home from the sea, dancing hornpipes. Two young innocents, absurdly shy and absurdly in love. A background village chorus of singing bumpkins.

Allusions to grand opera: the gypsy scene from Il Trovatore, the mad scene from Lucia di Lammermoor. Gothic romance and Victorian melodrama. A tale of mistaken identity, love thwarted, love regained, happy couplings for all, and all's well that ends well -- all lifted out of Shakespearean comedy.

Yes, it's July again, and time for another Gilbert & Sullivan Society production. This year, it's Ruddigore, a production last presented by the Society in 1995.

In a sense, if you've seen one Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, you've seen them all. But each still has its own special brand of silliness, satire, and satisfying music. Each has its own lyrical tunes, declamatory quasi-recitatives, and an example or two of the trademark -- and highly enjoyable and unforgettable -- G&S patter.

Such patters are often satirical -- satirizing the politics and social mores of the Victorian era, sometimes supplemented by a few updated verses good-naturedly attacking the foibles of our own times and place. Ruddigore has a patter -- presented at a tempo even more breathless than usual -- that's almost post-modern in concept, with its amusing (if unintelligable) self-referential conclusion:

If I had been so lucky as to have a steady brother
Who could talk to me as we are talking now to one another –
Who could give me good advice when he discovered I was erring
(Which is just the very favour which on you I am conferring),
My existance would have made a rather interesting idyll,
And I might have lived and died a very decent indiwiddle.
This particularly rapid, unintelligible patter
Isn’t generally heard, and if it is it doesn’t matter!

The excellent feature of any work by G&S is that it really doesn't matter -- it has no notable redeeming social value -- and yet you walk out of the theater happy, whistling, chuckling, and with no doubt whatsoever that your evening's been well spent.

Ruddigore continues playing at Seattle's Bagley Wright Theater through July 30.

Chill in Seattle

2011-07-20T19:11:00.000-07:00

I'm not wise at all. I told you, I know nothing. I know books, and I know how to string words together -- it doesn't mean I know how to speak about the things that matter most to me.
--André Aciman

Every self-appointed member of the blognoscenti soon finds himself pontificating on topics about which he knows little, but on which he doesn't hesitate to speak at length. Such a self-appointed expert may within a few weeks time spew forth, for example -- in pompous bursts of High Academic English -- unreadable essays on journalism, economics, Shakespearean pot smoking, constitutional theory, the political status of colonial dependencies, and -- as his delusions of grandeur become ever more divorced from reality, and his sentence structures ever more strained -- mathematical discourses on irrational numbers and absurdly simplistic comments on quantum mechanics.

The only cure, aside from psychoanalysis or, perhaps, electroshock therapy, is for the blogomaniac to sit back, breathe deeply, and demand of himself an essay based on his own personal experience -- not on his half-baked book learning. Speak about things that really "matter most to me," in other words.

Take the weather, for example. (In Seattle, that last sentence elicits immediate Henny Youngman-esque rejoinders, ones that I'll now ignore.)

Our relationship with the weather is never abstract, always direct and personal. I understand that most of you fellow Americans are suffering from the much-denied outcome ("liberal pseudo-science!") of global warming. Y'all seem trapped under a one million square mile "heat dome", making your lives a living hell, if news reports are to be believed. But here in the Northwest Corner? Au contraire, mes amis. We're still waiting for summer to arrive.

According to the Seattle Times, we've had 78 minutes of summer so far in 2011 -- right up until this, the 20th day of July. To be precise, we had 12 minutes of summer on July 2, and another 66 minutes (hooray!) of summer on July 6 -- "summer," for our purposes, being defined as any temperature of 80 degrees or higher. This morning, I was so chilly when I got up that I almost turned on the furnace, which would have been in utter violation of my personal furnace ban, running from June 1 to October 1.

Even when it's been "warm" this year -- i.e., over 65 degrees -- it's often been sprinkling.

But here in the Northwest, we resemble our climatic cousins, the English. Like the Brits, we might mutter about the weather, but we'd never move away. When someone tells you that he's leaving Seattle because of the rain, or the lack of sunshine, you can bet he wasn't born here. He's a carpetbagger, an interloper who came here because he was unhappy somewhere else, and who's now moving on because he's unhappy here. But he carries his unhappiness around with him, a little rain cloud above his head. It ain't gonna get no better, no matter where he runs to next.

In my neighborhood -- as in most Seattle neighborhoods -- it's a matter of environmental pride that we not water our lawns in the summer. We watch them turn gradually brown during June, stay brown throughout the summer (needing no mowing!), and come back green and healthy when the rains return in September. But today, I look out my window and what do I see? I see that my lawn, and everyone else's, is as soft and green as though it were April. Rain. Precip. Mother Nature's own sprinkler system. When she slams one door in your face, she hands you a silver lining with the other. So to speak.

It may be cool out this summer, but it isn't cold. I can walk out the door anytime I want, wearing only (above the waist) a t-shirt, and not feel uncomfortable. Just cool. And pleasantly non-sweaty. It may rain, but it rarely pours. I can walk in a summer sprinkle -- still wearing that non-sweaty t-shirt -- and get only pleasantly damp. Wet t-shirts do dry without complication, by the way; that's their big advantage over silk business suits. Which Northwesterners rarely wear. Not even CEO's like Bill Gates.

If this were a "normal" hot summer, spring would have been long over. Only the occasional hardy dandelion would still be displaying a bit of color. But as I walk around the neighborhood today, I'm swimming in vernal abundance, engulfed in sweet smelling floral displays. The flowers began blooming in late January -- a mild winter -- and many are still blooming today.

Sure, we'd like it to be warmer. And sunnier. But we adjust. We still hike -- cool temperatures are great for hiking, and a little rain never hurts. We picnic -- well, yeah, the potato salad does get a little runny, the sandwiches a little soggy, but we just duck for cover. "Someone left the cake out in the rain" -- ah, who cares? We still camp -- we just build the campfire up a little higher, and stake the rain flies a little more securely. The Mariners still play baseball (as if anyone still cared) -- they just close the dome.

Northwest weather teaches us to temper our expectations. To avoid being devastated when the barometer drops. To enjoy the beauty of forests and mountains when they're touched by fog and drizzle, as well as when kissed by the sun. To enjoy what we're doing and the people we're with -- even when the weather isn't "perfect," even when not everything's gone exactly according to plan. To enjoy life all the more, many times, just because it doesn't always go according to plan.

Our weather is flexible, and that may have taught us a bit of flexibility in response. As a result, I submit that we're less apt than many folks living elsewhere to whine at every setback, to complain at every obstruction, to feel devastated at each of life's vicissitudes, to constantly fear we're missing out on something to which we're entitled. We're chill. We go with the flow.

Life in the Northwest Corner's good, very good, even if not perfect.

And that's something I didn't have to learn from books.

Cheers for the gray lady

2011-07-16T14:26:00.000-07:00

I walked out to the sidewalk this morning, picked up my copy of the New York Times, and removed its plastic cover -- soaked with Seattle rain -- with special care. Today, the newspaper seemed more precious and exceptional than usual.

Last night, I'd gone to watch the documentary, Page One: Inside the New York Times, now playing in theaters. The movie, centered on the work of David Carr, media columnist for the NYT, gives an exciting picture of what goes on behind the scenes at the paper. The film focuses especially on the financial crisis resulting from a drop in paid subscriptions and an even more drastic recent drop in advertising revenue, and on the growing rivalry between traditional print newspapers and on-line rivals such as the Huntington Post.

Carr and other Times spokesmen make a compelling case that aggregators of bits of news from all over (which adequately describes most on-line competiters) are no substitute for traditional news organizations that not only collect the news but support correspondents and news bureaus that actively seek it out.

Although the Murdoch scandal had not yet become news when the documentary was filmed, Sam Zell's purchase of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times were used to illustrate what happens when journalism is viewed primarily as a profit generating business rather than as a profession -- when "give the public what it wants" supersedes editorial judgment as to what is newsworthy. As Carr wrote last Monday in his regular column, discussing the press's role in uncovering the Murdoch scandal:

The Guardian stayed on the phone-hacking story like a dog on a meat bone, acting very much in the British tradition of a crusading press, and goosing the story back to life after years of dormancy. Mr. Murdoch, ever the populist, prefers his crusades to be built on chronic ridicule and bombast. But as The Guardian has shown, the steady accretion of fact — an exercise Mr. Murdoch has historically regarded as bland and elitist — can have a profound effect.

Everyone recognizes the value today's internet resources -- YouTube videos, tweets, citizen reporting -- provide in uncovering facts that otherwise would remain hidden. The Times itself is making increasing use of blogs on its on-line version. But significant stories need more than presentation of a melange of uncoordinated facts. They need the tenacity, organization, and editorial judgment that a good newspaper can bring to bear. (And the film discusses certain self-acknowledged lapses in such editorial judgment that have hurt the Times's credibility.)

The documentary perhaps tries to touch too many bases in an an hour and a half. Its reliance on filmed conversations among editors and writers, and on apparently unrehearsed interviews, may cause the viewer some difficulty in following its argument, and some dismay as topics change just as they are becoming interesting. But the movie -- by these very conversations in the face of deadlines and by the often tense interviews -- strongly conveys the excitement of working for a news organization with a history of excellence, one that considers itself America's "newspaper of record."

The Times editors interviewed in the movie seem optimistic that the NYT will continue as the country's leading newspaper, despite acute pressures upon it, financial and otherwise. An outside expert on media affairs was less sanguine, warning that while print newspapers provide valuable services to the country, and therefore "should" survive, it's a mistake to assume that "should survive" necessarily implies "will survive."

A glance through this morning's New York Times reveals one lengthy story after another, covering complex and crucial national, international, and business news issues. These are factual stories and analytical pieces that I doubt exist elsewhere -- except when blogs, aggregators, and lesser newspapers themselves rely, as they often do, on the original work done by the New York Times.

For years, I've subscribed to the Times's Saturday and Sunday editions. I'm now seriously considering signing up for daily delivery. Maybe that's more daily reading than I can handle -- my original reason for the limited subscription -- but I figure it's the least I can do.

I'd hate to live in a country that relied solely on CNN and Fox News for its understanding of the world.

Da capo al fine

2011-07-12T13:15:00.000-07:00

I returned, this morning, from my final piano lesson of the "school year," having now completed 1½ years in my latest reincarnation as a piano student. No more lessons until the end of August.

My reaction to my upcoming "vacation" is multi-faceted: First, there's my good, old fashioned "no more classes, no more books" sense of relief. Second, a determination to maintain some sort of regimen of practice throughout the summer, even though I'll be lacking the incentive of preparation for my next weekly lesson. And finally, a contemplation of the past year -- looking back at the progress I've made to date.

Yes, I'm still working primarily on the same Beethoven sonata. To my readers my progress must seem painfully slow. But learning a sonata is a bit like reading a serious novel: each re-reading reveals something new about the author, about his plot and characterization, about the complexities of life -- and about oneself.

No matter how many times I play a passage, my instructor -- while generous with compliments -- has suggestions for how I might play it better. Or observations: Note how the composer returns, over and over, to B-flat, until he finally resolves the extended phrase with a C-minor chord. Or questions: Why do you think Beethoven wrote this phrase as he did? Or analogies: Think of yourself as playing all four parts of a string quartet; give each instrument an adequate opportunity to show off its own performance.

In other words, while helping me to master a sonata, she is also subtly teaching me a tiny bit of musical theory.

"Master a sonata" -- believe me, I have a long way to go. If I were a kid, preparing for a recital, I'd feel that my situation was hopeless. But I'm doing this simply for my own gratification (although, I suppose that someday I'll force family members to sit quietly for 19 or 20 minutes, and listen to the whole shebang.)

Nineteen or 20 minutes. Such a short sonata, compared to the amount of practice and the number of lessons it's taken me to get just this far.

But is it worth it? You bet!

Running the asylum

2011-07-11T10:03:00.000-07:00

If I haven't commented so far on the partisan shooting match in Congress over the raising of the federal debt limit, it hasn't been out of lack of interest. The economic issues are difficult, and economics isn't a field in which I pretend much competence. (Too bad a few of the idiots -- I'm using the term in something close to its technical definition -- who spill their vituperations all over the internet don't exercise similar restraint.)

I do have political preferences -- the growth in the federal debt should not, in the long term, exceed growth in gross domestic product; spending cuts should not damage programs that maintain and improve the nation's infrastructure and/or will lead to future growth in employment; the rich should pay taxes and suffer loss of benefits in a manner proportionate to the demands placed on the poor.

How we get there is the technically difficult problem about which I have uncertainty.

I rely primarily on analysis by The Economist for my limited economic insights. Although the magazine's bias is toward the laissez faire economic principles traditionally advocated by the Republican party, its data seem objective and its analysis transparent. If the magazine has a secret -- as opposed to open and acknowledged -- political agenda, it isn't apparent to me.

The past few issues have lambasted the Republicans on their handling of the debt limit increase. "Lexington," the magazine's commentator on American affairs, notes (7-2-11) that the new Republican members of the House have elevated "a preference" for not raising taxes "into a fetish."

Even Reagan, a supply-sider persuaded by Arthur Laffer's pretty curves that his tax cuts would pay for themselves, raised taxes when they did not. To non-partisans, the idea of taming the deficit by spending cuts alone flies against both common sense and arithmetic.

The magazine pointed out last year that federal taxes, adjusted for inflation, are now at the lowest level since before the Korean war.

Lexington concludes, reminding us of the Republican outrage when the Democrats used their majorities, and their hold on the presidency, to "ram" health care reform through Congress and into law.

Now the Republicans are using the spectre of a debt default to impose their own radical vision of how to reform America, before having won control of the Senate, the White House or even, many will say, the argument. That strikes some Americans as nothing less than blackmail.

This week (7-9-11), The Economist editorializes in a leader ("Shame on them") that America's present debt load -- at 65 percent of GDP -- is "perfectly affordable," and that the closer you look, "the more unprincipled the Republicans look." The leader concludes:

Both parties have in recent months been guilty of fiscal recklessness. Right now, though, the blame falls clearly on the Republicans. Independent voters should take note.

This is strong language from a publication that normally aligns with Republicans on economic issues.

Republican behavior in Congress calls to mind the warning from another newspaper that the Republicans are in danger of transforming themselves from a normal political party into an extremist cult.

"Bye-bye, sci-fi"

2011-07-08T13:07:00.000-07:00

The summer I was 12, I spent a day at the beach in bed with badly sunburned legs, reading my parents' copy of The Exploration of Space, by Arthur C. Clarke. (The very same Arthur C. Clarke who wrote Sentinal of Eternity, the short story upon which the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey was loosely based.)

I was thinking that I still had Clarke's book on my bookshelves, but a frustrating search just now has failed to locate it. It's been a number of years since I last glanced at it -- a non-fictional discussion of space travel, written in 1951, at a time when earth satellites still seemed a distant dream. But I remember the strong fascination it had for my young mind. Much of the book explained in simple terms the physics of rocket propulsion in the vacuum of outer space -- many non-scientifically trained people at the time still believed that rockets wouldn't work unless they had some atmosphere "to push against" -- and how a satellite, once in orbit, would continue circling the earth indefinitely without needing any further propulsion.

This book was intended for the general reader, and for the general reader in 1951 the science involved in space travel seems to have been novel.

So most of the book would now be outdated, although its science still accurate -- material that today's reader with only a casual knowledge of science already understands. Pushed by competition with the USSR, moreover, rocket and satellite technology developed perhaps even faster than Clarke had anticipated.

But what I really remember from the book are the beautiful color plates with imaginative renderings of domed colonies on the Moon and on Mars. As I recall, Clarke forecast a moon base by about 2000, and a colony planted on the Martian surface not too many years later. I was excited to realize that my generation would live to witness these achievements -- maybe not yet to visit foreign colonies, but at least to read about them in magazines and to watch activities within them on television.

After all, as Clarke said himself -- in a quotation from the book that I found on-line:

If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run - and often in the short one - the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.

So -- here we are in 2011. Where is our colony on Mars? Where is the permanent Moon base? Where are signs of Clarke's "laughably conservative" prophesies?

Today, in the 135th launch of the space shuttle program, the shuttle Atlantis lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center. It was America's last launch. The program now ends. Last week's cover of the Economist showed a photograph of a space shuttle against the curvature of the Earth, overprinted with the legend, "The End of the Space Age." The magazine's leader editorializes, apparently with some satisfaction:

It is quite conceivable that 36,000 km [the orbit of communications satellites] will prove the limit of human ambition. It is equally conceivable that the fantasy-made-reality of human space flight will return to fantasy. It is likely that the Space Age is over. ... There is no appetite to return to the moon, let alone push on to Mars, El Dorado of space exploration. The technology could be there, but the passion has gone. ... [H]umanity's dreams of a future beyond that final frontier have, largely, faded.

Well, screw you, 21st century mankind, for spitting a 12-year-old in the face, and grinding his dreams underfoot.

I imagine darkly an alternative universe, where a Lisbon business-oriented newspaper might have written, snidely, 500 years ago:

Now that we have explored the Azores, there is little appetite for further exploration. The dreamers -- with their incessant chatter about a spherical Earth and of distant lands of gold and spices -- have had their day. We have the ships to sail farther, but not the passion. So, stop dreaming, Portugal. Smother your childish excitement, and teach your own children to be hard-nosed realists. Nothing beyond the Azores is worth thinking about. Let's all learn to just be the best farmers and wine-makers that we know how.

Highland ghosts

2011-07-07T19:19:00.000-07:00

As I prepare for my Highlands walk in Scotland, now only 24 days away, I'm repeatedly impressed by the bleakness, the barrenness, the desolation -- the atmosphere of gloom -- of some of the areas through which I'll be hiking. Austerely beautiful, yes, but also cold and unforgiving.

A striking example is Glen Coe. That name sounds deceptively gentle and pretty to our Yankee ears, perhaps because of its association with a number of pleasant American towns named "Glencoe" after the Scottish original. But Glen Coe is a narrow glacial valley, and, until quite recently, isolated and remote . The river Coe runs through the glen. The meaning of its name is lost to history, "Coe" (or "Comhan" in Gaelic) most likely arising out of some unknown, pre-Gaelic language.

The hiker comes down into the glen off of Rannoch Moor to the east, itself a wild and dampish spot, drenched by over 100 inches of rain a year. The names of surrounding mountains and other physical features sound as though they were drawn directly from Tolkien's Middle Earth: Meall a'Bhuiridh, Stob Dearg, Aonach Mor, River Etive. I'll spend my night in the glen at the isolated Kingshouse, an eighteenth century hostelry which played its part in the salt smuggling trade of days long past.

But Glen Coe is best known to history for the infamous Glen Coe Massacre of Clan MacDonald in 1692.

The horror of that massacre began with political events at the highest level. When William of Orange was summoned to become king of England, he succeeded the deposed James II, who had also been James VII of Scotland. The Jacobite uprisings followed, anti-English rebellions by Scots -- especially Highlanders -- whose loyalties remained with James. Once the uprisings were put down, William gave each Highlander clan a January 1st deadline by which it could swear allegiance to his rule and be pardoned for its part in the uprising.

The MacDonald chief was a few days late in swearing his oath; this tardiness resulted from several causes, including adverse weather and the unavailability during the holidays of a proper English authority to hear the oath. It was assumed that the chief had fulfilled the spirit of the requirement and that the clan would receive its pardon. But the cabinet member responsible for Scottish affairs, a Scot himself who felt that the Highlander clans posed an obstacle to good government, had other ideas.

In February, 120 soldiers were sent to Glen Coe to be billeted with the local clansmen, supposedly while they went about collecting a routine tax. They were greeted as guests by the MacDonalds. Soldiers and clansmen fraternized in a friendly fashion for about two weeks, until the order was received by messenger from Fort William: Put to the sword every member of the clan under 70 years of age. The English commanding officer sat up playing cards with his hosts the night before the massacre, wished them all a good night upon retiring, and accepted an invitation to dinner the following day.

At 5 a.m., the English forces arose silently from their beds and killed the Highlanders in their sleep or while they attempted escape. Thirty-eight men were thus killed. The soldiers then burned every house and drove off all the livestock, leaving another 40 women and children to die of starvation and exposure. Some MacDonalds escaped with their lives into the hills only because English reinforcements, with orders to kill all fleeing members of the clan, were late in arriving on the scene.

The bleakness of Glen Coe therefore lies not entirely in its solitude and in its stark physical features. Although the area is now accessed by a modern road, and serves as a popular hiking and climbing center in summer and as a ski area in winter, ancient wrongs hang like a mist over the narrow glen, wrongs that remain forever unrequited.

I'll be disappointed if I don't feel surrounded by the restless ghosts of the men, women and wee bairns of Clan MacDonald as I lie fitfully abed in Glen Coe, Scotland.

The tao of τ: bidding farewell to π?

2011-07-01T16:42:00.000-07:00

"Pi" is absolutely amazing!

That was my reaction in grade school arithmentic class. I learned you didn't have to take a ruler and somehow measure the distance around a circle: You could simply measure the diameter and multiply by pi. C = πd, as our books presented it. It was an equation taught us long before we entered algebra, along with the even more miraculous equation for the area of a circle: A = πr².

The value of pi was usually given as 3.14, making our calculations easy. It wasn't until later -- maybe 7th grade -- that we learned that pi was an irrational number -- i.e., a number that couldn't be expressed as a fraction, and a number whose decimal expansion went on forever. Pi, therefore, could be expressed ever more precisely with each added digit, but no matter how many digits you added, it still wouldn't express with complete perfection the ratio between the diameter and the area of a circle.

Pi was an ideal, but an unattainable ideal: one that couldn't be described precisely with the numbers we had available.

People with strange mental abilities have memorized the decimal expansion of pi to incredible lengths. According to one source, a fellow from Pennsylvania named Mark Umile holds the record. In 2007, Umile recited from memory the first 15,314 digits of the pi expansion. I'm tempted to exclaim to this gentleman, "Sir, get a life!" -- but then, I have to ask, do I spend my days all that much more productively?

Anyway, this clutter of trivia has been prompted by a news story today, advising us that many mathematicians aren't happy with pi. It's not that they think it's incorrectly used, or that its value has been incorrectly calculated. They simply don't like using the diameter of a circle as the starting point for defining a universal constant.

The diameter is virtually never used in higher mathematics. All equations are expressed in terms of the radius -- one half of the diameter. So, once past grade school arithmetic, C = πd is often written C = 2πr. Consequently, mathematicians would feel more comfortable describing the constant in terms of the ratio between the circumference and the radius, rather than between the circumference and twice the radiuis.

Therefore, according to the news article, we should adopt 2π as our basic constant, and call it "tau," another Greek letter, one that is written "τ". Using tau as the constant is not only more elegant, they contend, but certain uses of pi that students begin running into once they get beyond fifth grade or so would be understood more intuitively if pi were replaced with tau. They hope to be reasonable -- they don't want to eliminate pi, they assure us, they just want to teach students to think in terms of tau, rather than pi. Start 'em off in grade school with C = τr, and their lives will be much easier as they get older.

This all sounds sort of reasonable, I suppose. It makes more sense than changing AD and BC to "CE" and "BCE." But these nice professors are explaining their views to a country whose citizens insist on seeing the world about them as one measured in miles, pecks, bushels, furlongs, quarts, and acres. You think they're going to adopt tau any more readily than they adopt liters instead of gallons? Good luck with that! I don't think they're going to buy it. Call it American exceptionalism, if you will. "That's not what they taught us when I was a boy," they'll exclaim. "Why fix it if it ain't broke?"

And the deal breaker: "If God wanted us to use tau, why did he give us pi?. I'll just stick with the good ol' time arithmetic, thank you much!"

Go Internet Explorers®!! Fight Team Fight!!

2011-06-29T10:00:00.000-07:00

Husky Stadium and I go way back.

I saw it for the first time when I was 12 years old. But not for a football game. My family was taking a tourist boat ride through the locks, around Lake Union, through the Montlake Cut, and into Lake Washington. As we moved through the Cut, I saw the stadium, from exactly the same angle as shown here in the photograph. I stared in amazement.

I'd never seen circular pedestrian ramps like that, and I had no idea what they were. They looked like two giant worm drives. But what was their purpose, I wondered? They must somehow raise and lower the stadium roof, closing it up tight like a clam shell. But why? How totally weird! But then, when you're 12, much in life seems weird.

They soon will be gone. The worm drives, and the entire south side of the stadium, to which they're attached. Everything will be leveled, with the exception of the more recently constructed north stands. The existing stadium and field will be replaced by a new horseshoe stadium -- the stands moved closer to the field, with the track circling the football field eliminated. Plush new accommodations for wealthy ticketholders and end zone seating for those students who insist on attending games.

But the demolition of Husky Stadium will be more than the start of its renovation. It will also mark the end of the name "Husky Stadium."

The University has offered "naming rights" to the new stadium "in perpetuity." The school asks for a mere $50 million. If the $50 million isn't forthcoming, the school will auction off naming rights for periods of shorter duration. "Naming" is clearly the rage nowadays. For example, while the new stadium is being built, the Huskies will play downtown in CenturyLink Field, née Qwest Field, née Seahawks Stadium. And for further example, the basketball team this year will play in Alaska Airlines Arena; née Bank of America Arena; née, simply, Hec Ed Pavilion.

It doesn't stop with athletic buildings. New academic buildings are being named after corporate sponsors as quickly as they're being built. Ultimately, the sky should be the limit. Why not sell off naming rights to autumn, winter and spring quarters? To departments: DuPont Chemistry Department, GM Mechanical Engineering Department, Weyerhaeuser School of Forestry, Seattle Repertory Theatre Drama Department, FoxNews Creative Writing Department?

Hell, why not sell off the entire university? Allow our local companies to honor themselves -- for cold cash. The Amazon University of Washington? Boeing University of Washington? Or, more euphonically, Boeing State University? University of Microsoft? Yeah, that should work. And why Huskies? What have those Alaska sled dogs ever contributed to university coffers?

How about the Internet Explorers? The U. of Microsoft Internet Explorers. The IE's for short? Love that yell: Aiiiiiii-eeeeeeee!!! Go Explorers! Download the Cougs!

My wonder years -- my being a naive 12 year old -- that was a long time ago. We've come a long ways, baby.

In Everest's shadow

2011-06-28T12:09:00.000-07:00

Just 33 days until I leave for my hiking trip in Scotland, which I discussed in an earlier post. Since that earlier post, I've been reading additional information about my planned route -- beautiful and scenic, but, as I've also discovered, wet, muddy, exposed to high winds and heavy rains, and infested with ticks and the famous midges previously lamented. Parts of the route get 100 inches of rainfall per year -- and August is frequently a rainy month.

Wow, if I'd wanted to be all that miserable, I could have stayed in Seattle!

But the Scotland hike -- assuming I survive -- will be merely a training exercise for this year's major pedestrian effort.

During the first three weeks of October, Pascal and I will once more return to Nepal, this time for a serious exploration of the Mt. Everest region. Pascal, long-time readers of this blog may recall, also joined me for Himalayan treks in the Ladakh region of the Indian Himalayas in 2005, and to Annapurna base camp in 2009. He's now 24, and surely old enough to be settling into a quiet middle age, but he seems eager to leap into yet another expedition, and, if necessary, to assist in returning my remains to my family in a body bag. We'll be part of a total party of five trekkers.

My nephew Denny and I hiked to the base of Everest in 1995, and this year's trek follows the same route for the first two or three days -- from the tiny airport at Lukla to the Sherpa "capital" of Namche Bazaar (11,200 ft.). Our trail then leaves the main "yak highway" to Everest base camp, and heads in a more northwestern direction, ending up in the Gokyo Valley. From that valley, we will view Everest from a different, more westerly perspective, rather than from the south as we did in 1995. From the Gokyo valley, we'll have excellent, close-up views of four of the eight tallest peaks on earth: Everest, Cho Oyu, Lhotse, and Makalu. Along the route, we'll also have views of other magnificent peaks: Ama Dablam, Nuptse, Teng Kangpoche, and Kwongde.

While only the most basic and dirtiest of accommodations -- "tea houses" -- existed trailside in 1995, and our group of four hikers camped in tents, 16 years have done their bit in "improving" the wilderness. And so we'll be staying in trekking lodges in the lower and more accessible areas, such as Namche Bazaar (where Denny and I shared a tent in our guide's "front yard" in 1995, eating our meals upstairs in his house as chickens wandered up and down the stairs, and yaks made restless noises below in the first floor stables). But we'll camp in tents after Namche, as our trek takes us to higher and more remote regions.

After enjoying the lake-studded Gokyo valley (15,800 ft.) for a couple of days, we begin our climb to the high point of the trek -- Renjo La pass, at 17,880 ft. If I'm still alive once I reach that elevation, Renjo La will be the third highest elevation I've ever attained (outside an airplane). Only Kilimanjaro (19,300 ft.) and Kalapatar (18,200 ft.) at the base of Everest have been higher. I was younger for those climbs, of course, and no doubt had heartier lungs -- and more spare brain cells that I could afford to lose to the ravages of hypoxia.

Oh well, we'll just have to see how it goes!

After crossing over Renjo La, our trail loops back and descends for about three days until it re-unites with the main Everest trail at Namche Bazaar, and thence back down to Lukla (9,200 ft.), where a plane will fly us back to Kathmandu.

I'm not overlooking the pleasures and challenges of my upcoming Scottish hike, but obviously I'll be using it to check out all my bodily systems, hoping to assure myself that they'll be functioning properly in October. Both trips will be exciting, and I'm looking forward eagerly to both.

-----------------------

Photo -- Everest viewed from Gokyo Valley

Libertarianism in New York

2011-06-25T10:46:00.000-07:00

New York's approval of same-sex marriage last night is being celebrated -- rightly -- as a victory in the struggle for gay rights. From a more distant perspective, however, it also represents another step in the gradual ascendancy in America of one concept of government over another -- and equally respectable philosophically -- concept: a victory of social libertarianism over neo-conservativsm.

The balance of victory in the New York Senate was provided by four Republican senators, two of whom had voted against a similar measure two years ago. One of those senators (incidentally, a Catholic) stated that, after much personal anguish, he could not again vote to deny equal marital rights to gay citizens of his state. In other words, he now viewed the vote as one affecting civil rights. On the other hand, the Catholic bishops of New York declared after the vote:

that marriage is the joining of one man and one woman in a lifelong, loving union that is open to children, ordered for the good of those children and the spouses themselves. This definition cannot change, though we realize that our beliefs about the nature of marriage will continue to be ridiculed, ....

The bishops' statement may be slightly disingenuous -- the bill passed last night is not an attack upon their religious and sacramental definition of marriage -- but inherent in their statement is a political philosophy that in recent years has represented the social aspect of a broader package known as "neo-conservatism." But the philosophy is hardly recent; it dates back at least to Plato, and was certainly fully expressed by Calvin in sixteenth century Geneva and by the pilgrim fathers in New England. Simply stated, the philosophy asserts that one function of the state is to define and express the values of the community, and to encourage (and, when necessary, force) individuals to adhere to those values.

According to this political philosophy, if the community's accepted norms -- religious, social, cultural, whatever -- insist that marriage is limited to unions between a man and a woman, the state is fully justified in enforcing that limitation, and in providing sanctions against individuals who seek to live their lives otherwise. In its more moderate form, the neo-conservative philosophy might require some reasonable nexus between the community value being protected and the behavior being sanctioned -- e.g., does permitting unions between couples of the same sex really damage the community's traditional concept of marriage -- but once such damage is shown to be possible, the state would be justified in cracking down on aberrant behavior.

Contrary to the neo-conservative philosophy, and living along side it during most of American history, has been a strand of social libertarianism -- "keep the government out of my life." In simplistic terms, libertarianism holds that unless my acts directly harm someone other than myself, the government has no legitimate interest in controlling what I'm doing. The equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has often been interpreted to promote a form of libertarianism, preventing the government from controlling individual behavior that has no reasonable nexus with a legitimate governmental objective.

American society and government have swung back and forth between the two inconsistent poles. The trend since World War II has been, fitfully, toward social libertarianism. The cause for this trend has been the increasingly fragmented social consensus in a population that is no longer descended primarily from Anglican and Nonconforming immigrants from Britain to the East Coast, but that now draws from every geographical region, cultural background and religious belief in the world. With such diversity -- itself increasingly seen as one of America's strengths -- there are fewer areas of genuine social consensus that the government can legitimately enforce.

In the absence of such consensus, the cultural aspects of neo-conservatism become less and less relevant philosophically, and appear more and more as simply the imposition of the values of one minority group (or, at times, those of a bare majority) on the lives of the rest of the population. When cultural and religious consensus breaks down, libertarianism becomes an increasingly attractive alternative philosophy, even for those to whom neo-conservatism might be attractive under different conditions.

After all -- and churches themselves might well ponder this -- do I want to set the precedent of imposing my beliefs on others today, while I'm part of a bare majority, when tomorrow I may well be in the minority?

We appear to be at the point in American history, therefore, when the balance is tipping to social libertarianism. The tipping will never be complete, and we needn't fear radical changes in legislation. Where a clear consensus as to appropriate conduct exists, it can and will still be enforced. Cock fighting and bear baiting will continue to be outlawed; marriage between humans and orangutans, the possibility of which seems to have alarmed some writers, will still be outside the pale. Recognition of a family headed by two men or two women today won't lead ineluctably to another Caligula tomorrow appointing his horse as consul.

And churches -- themselves not subject to the government's need to balance individual rights against consensus values -- will still be free to define marriage for their members in accord with their own beliefs and values, and to seek new adherents to their beliefs.

Evolution of values in a society shouldn't be equated with disappearance of values; it simply reflects the fact that healthy societies themselves change. In diverse societies, values compete freely among themselves for acceptance; the government's thumb doesn't try to tip the scale.

Perchance to dream?

2011-06-23T12:33:00.000-07:00

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.
--The Tempest, act iii, scene 2

Those of us who have struggled through some of Shakespeare's plays -- notably The Tempest -- have sometimes wondered to ourselves: What was that dude smoking?

We may soon have an answer.

Paleontologists are about to descend on Stratford-on-Avon and run DNA tests on the Bard's bones. While they're at it, they plan to check out rumors that our boy William was an enthusiastic pot smoker -- rumors based on the discovery of a couple dozen odd pipes in his garden, together with the fact that marijuana was cultivated in England during his years on earth. Investigators will have to brave the curse that Shakespeare placed on his tomb, a curse on anyone who disturbed the remnants of his mortal coil.

Meanwhile, four hundred years after Shakespeare's death, here in our soberly Scandinavian state of Washington, an unusual coalition of public figures yesterday filed a statewide initiative that would legalize and regulate (through the Liquor Control Board) the sale and use of marijuana. The initiative is being supported by the Seattle City Attorney, by a former U.S. Attorney, by a former president of the Washington Bar, and by travel writer Rick Steves.

If voters aren't sufficiently convinced by the policy arguments that are being offered for legalization, they may at least conclude that if toking up was good enough for Shakespeare, it's good enough for them. Some of the most beautiful and meaningful writing in the English tongue came, after all, from the pen of a guy who may have been flying high as a kite.

Flout 'em and scout 'em
And scout 'em and flout 'em
Thought is free.
--The Tempest, act iii, scene 2

That's what I say. See what I mean? Hey, wait a minute? What?

Thou deboshed fish thou.
--The Tempest, act iii, scene 2.

Huh? What da? What's that dude smokin', anyway?

The eyes of youth

2011-06-20T13:04:00.000-07:00

A decade ago, I spent a short two weeks wandering around Central Europe -- eastern Germany, Austria, Hungary and the Czech Republic. That would be a lot of territory to see in two weeks, of course. More truthfully, I should say that I spent two weeks visiting large cities in those countries: Berlin, Dresden, Vienna, Prague and Budapest.

But in each large city, I did try to get out of town a bit, so that I wasn't locked into a "Famous Capitals" sort of tour. While in Vienna, for example, I made a special effort to hop a train to the little town of Melk. Melk is most famous as the site of Stift Melk -- a very large Benedictine abbey, located scenically on a hill overlooking the Danube.

Why Melk? The power of the written word. Not long before my travels, I had read, entranced, A Time of Gifts, by Patrick Leigh Fermor, the first of two volumes describing his wanderings on foot in 1933-35, at the age of 18, from the English Channel to Constantinople (Istanbul).

Leigh Fermor was quite a kid. He had been kicked out of what in America we would call prep school, after he'd been caught smooching with the local grocer's daughter. He nevertheless was already well educated at 18, self-taught to an extent that's difficult today for us to believe. Moreover, he had a sense of self-confidence that permitted him to feel equally at ease with the workers and peasants among whom he traveled and the European aristocrats and diplomats who often took him in, offered him food and shelter, and found him fascinating and agreeable company.

Like a fair number of other English youth in that era, he had a fine sense for both literature and art. And it was his vivid description, in musical metaphors, of Melk abbey that put me on the train from Vienna, headed up the Danube for a day's exploration of Melk:

Overtures and preludes followed each other as courtyard opened on courtyard. Ascending staircases unfolded as vaingloriously as pavanes. Cloisters developed with the complexity of double, triple and quadruple fugues. The suites of state apartments concatenated with the variety, the mood and the décor of symphonic movements. Among the receding infinity of gold bindings in the library, the polished reflections, the galleries and the terrestial and celestial globes, gleaming in the radiance of their flared embrasures, music again seemed to intervene. A magnificent and measured polyphony crept in one's ears.

And so on, and on, and on.

Melk Abbey was indeed beautiful. I studied the same sights described by Leigh Fermor. But my trip journal, after having quoted the above passage, suggests my mild disappointment. And why wouldn't I have been a bit disappointed? A traveler needs a highly trained eye to view architecture as Leigh Fermor did; it also helps to be 18 years old, if you wish to feel it as emotionally and to express it with as little restraint as did this unusual young man. I once again learned the sad lesson that a sense of awe in the presence of magnificent art, architecture or music results only in part from the object that's being contemplated; much depends on the education and sensitivity that the viewer himself brings to the experience.

Leigh Fermor had little to say in his writings about the political currents that already were rocking the regions through which he traveled, but war was already looming ahead. Patrick Leigh Fermor was himself to play a part in that war. He was, in fact, the hero of W. Stanley Moss's memoir of the Cretan resistance, Ill Met by Moonlight. Moss, who was Leigh Fermor's second in command, tells the story of how his superior, as a daring young British Special Operations officer, led a group of partisans hiding in the Cretan mountains in an audacious kidnapping of the German general who was in command of the island.

According to a full page obituary in this week's Economist, Leigh Fermor never talked much in later years about his role in this sensational strike against the German occupation. He seemed far more pleased with the fact that when the German general, now Leigh Fermor's prisoner, one day quoted -- quite unexpectedly -- a line from Horace, "Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte,"¹ Leigh Fermor was able to come right back and complete the thought by reciting from memory the next five stanzas.

Patrick Leigh Fermor died last week at the age of 96. I suspect he is irreplaceable. I imagine, in fact, that his entire generation of eccentrically educated amateurs is irreplaceable, and that their passing is a sad loss to humane civilization.

-----------------------------------

¹"You see how [Mount] Soracte stands out white with deep snow..."

Warped in space

2011-06-13T13:37:00.000-07:00

After I finish writing each gem-like entry in this blog, I look around for an appropriate photograph or drawing to illustrate it. This time, however, I fell in love with the drawing (by NASA) first. The text that now follows is merely a pretext -- as it were -- for publishing the drawing.

The drawing shows Earth surrounded by a schematic of the space-time continuum. The little dragon fly-like doo-hicky swimming in space-time around the Earth is Gravity Probe B, an orbiting satellite launched jointly by Stanford and NASA in 2004. The purpose of the probe was to determine whether Einstein's theory of general relativity could be verified empirically. The final empirical data were received early last month.

Einstein's theory indicates, first, that any body of mass warps the time-space continuum surrounding it (thus creating what we view as its gravititational field), and, second, that as such a body rotates, it drags time-space around with it in a circle.

Imagine the Earth as if it were immersed in honey. As the planet rotated its axis and orbited the Sun, the honey around it would warp and swirl, and it's the same with space and time," said Francis Everitt, a Stanford physicist and principal investigator for Gravity Probe B.
--Stanford Report (5-4-11)

The gravity probe satellite contained four highly precise gyroscopes. Gyroscopes have the quality of maintaining an invariable orientation, pointing in the same fixed direction in space once operational. These were originally aimed at a single distant star. As they circled the Earth, the gyroscopes departed from their original orientation very slightly -- but measurably -- in almost precisely the amount predicted by Einstein's theory.

The differences in the actual data accumulated by Gravity Probe B from those expected from Newtonian physics -- differences attributable to relativistic "swirling" effects -- may seem miniscule, but it's been important that these differences be understood and recognized in developing precise applications for the GPS system. Measurements from the satellite have provided support not only for Einstein's theory, moreover, but for the Big Bang theory as well.

The schematic illustration showing directions in time-space being warped by the Earth's mass and rotation is figurative. The warping actually occurs in four dimensions -- three dimensions in space plus time. But it makes a pretty picture. And, from now on -- whenever I swirl a spoon around in a jar of honey -- I'll think of Dr. Everitt's evocative metaphor.

Man without a country

2011-06-12T13:12:00.001-07:00

I spent my first year after law school clerking for a federal judge in Honolulu. One day, the judge's secretary asked me to talk to a gentleman who had come to chat with the judge.

The visitor, a friendly, articulate, middle aged fellow, had some interesting ideas. My main recollection now is that he firmly believed that he was not obliged to pay income tax, because -- essentially -- he had received no money as income. He had been paid only in federal reserve notes, which, in his estimation, were not legal tender and therefore not taxable.

He had some legal arguments, which I now forget, but what surprised me was that he had no interest in the views of the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of the federal reserve system. The Supreme Court, I gathered, was simply part of the problem.

I was reminded of this introduction to the strange world beyond academia by a story in today's Spokane Spokesman-Review. It seems that there is now a group of individuals, hitherto unknown to me, who deny that they are citizens of the United States. Ok, you say, lots of people fit that description, even among American residents. But members of this group deny that they are citizens of any nation. They call themselves "sovereigns," and each is apparently a nation unto himself.

The newspaper story was prompted by the appearance of Adrian Shannon before a Spokane judge on charges of possession and distribution of marijuana. Mr. Shannon, like other "sovereigns," denies the legitimacy of all federal, state and local agencies. They believe themselves exempt from needing drivers' licenses and birth certificates, paying taxes, and being held accountable under criminal law.

No man is an island, entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
--John Donne

Actually, not so, Mr. Shannon and other sovereigns would assert. They want no part of any continent, of any main. Each sees himself as a one-person St. Helena or Easter Island.

“People call it a movement, but it’s individuals, literally sovereigns, that are all learning, ‘Hey we don’t have to put up with these ridiculous laws, because we are the government,’ ” Shannon said.

Apparently sovereigns do not always rely on profound philosophical arguments to win their points, however. Mr. Shannon, for example, claimed that his case was not properly on the day's court docket. Why so? Because his name had been written entirely in capital letters on the docket. Names written in all-caps do not apply to individuals, to his way of thinking, but only to some sort of corporate entities assigned governmental codes.

Judge Price ruled, more or less informally, on this contention:

“Well, whatever your name is, sir, get up here,” Price said.
“May I retain all my rights?” Shannon asked.
“Sir, get up here or you’re going to jail,” Price said.

"Sovereign" may simply be a more recent name for a fairly well-known type of legal species known as a "crackpot." (And I mean that in the best possible way.)

For example. I once had the pleasure of representing a minor defendant in a lawsuit brought by an Idaho plaintiff, a lawsuit that had ballooned, step by step, from a small legal claim to one against an enormous number of defendants. The lawsuit ended up asserting claims in excess of $1 trillion, and eventually named a number of federal judges, from districts all over the country as additional defendants (any judge who ruled against him on any issue soon found himself part of the lawsuit). By the time I became involved, this intrepid plaintiff from Idaho was seeking, among all his other claims, to have the State of Idaho declared improperly admitted to the union, with an injunction issued returning it to territorial status.

What I learned from that lawsuit (the plaintiff lost, by the way) was that judges are human, too, and they will put up with only so much time-consuming idiocy. Before Mr. Shannon proceeds much further down this trail, engaging himself in an adversarial posture with the judiciary, I suggest that he think through his options carefully.

Statehood?

2011-06-10T13:51:00.000-07:00

When President Obama arrives in Puerto Rico on Tuesday, he will be the first president since Kennedy to visit the island for the purpose of meeting with its people, rather than simply using it a conveniently warm and sunny spot to meet with other world leaders. So reports the New York Times today.

One topic on which the president will certainly face questions is Puerto Rico's future status relative to the United States. At present, it is characterized as a "Commonwealth," as is the Northern Mariana Islands. Its residents are citizens of the United States, but are not represented in Congress (aside from a non-voting "resident commissioner"), and have no vote in presidential elections.

According to the NYT, Obama promised in 2008 to resolve the island's political status during his first term. Accordingly, a presidential commission has recommended two votes during 2012: First, to determine whether the island should become independent; and second, assuming the answer to the first is "no," the nature of its future political association with the rest of the nation. Polls suggest that approximately 50 percent of its residents favor statehood.

Suppose the result of the two elections were to unambiguously support statehood? This would put pressure on Congress, and would confront the Republicans with a difficult dilemma. The island probably would be a predictably Democratic state. Statehood would give the Democrats two more senators. The island's population is only slightly less than that of Oregon, which means that it would be entitled to approximately the same number of six representatives in the House. If the size of the House of Representatives were to remain fixed by statute at 435, those six representatives would have to come from other states. Reapportionment after each decennial census is hard enough already, especially for those states that lose House seats.

Statehood would also give Puerto Rico approximately eight electoral votes in presidential elections.

The reflexive reaction of the Republicans would be to vote against statehood. After all, statehood for Alaska and Hawaii -- especially Hawaii -- was rejected repeatedly, despite referendums supporting statehood in both territories. The two territories were noncontiguous with the rest of the country, opponents argued. Hawaii was racially different from the mainland and its inhabitants seemed "foreign," many pointed out. (And the races often intermarried in the Islands, to the horror of Southern politicians in the 1950's and earlier.)

But opposition to Puerto Rico statehood would pose its own political risks for the Republicans. The hispanic vote is becoming an enormous factor throughout the country; party line Republican opposition to statehood would further alienate hispanics. Moreover, Florida is a critical state in presidential elections. There are now more Puerto Ricans living on the mainland than on the island itself, and many of the more recent migrants have moved to Florida. The new Florida residents tend to be educated and middle class; they would be expected to constitute a swing vote in that state, not a dunk shot for the Democrats. They also strongly favor statehood for Puerto Rico.

How many more groups around the country can the Republicans -- increasingly Southern, Mid-Western, rural, and evangelical -- afford to alientate and write off? This is a question that will keep their strategists up late at night, worrying.

When Congress finally granted statehood to Hawaii, it was a status for which 93 percent of the territory had voted. If only a slight majority of Puerto Ricans favor statehood in a plebiscite, that might be a factor justifying a "wait and see" approach before making an ultimate political decision. Commonwealth status does have some advantages for Puerto Rico -- it's not as though the island were being treated as a subject colony.

In the end, I'll gladly support whatever the voters of Puerto Rico decide is best for their future. But will the Republican Party?

There's a new day comin'

2011-06-07T19:26:00.000-07:00

This is the most unkindest cut of all.
--Julius Caesar, act iii, scene 2

Finally. For too long has our Nation been distracted by matters of foreign policy, terrorism, immigration reform, unemployment, civil liberties, environmental protection, health care reform, and the Congressional tweeting of inappropriate photos. These matters, though weighty, should not be used to shield from view a more urgent matter, a form of domestic terrorism that, generation after generation, has striken an intimate blow at half our population.

I refer, of course, to the horrors of male circumcision.

The clear-sighted voters of San Francisco will have a chance this November to put a total and complete stop to this barbaric practice, an end to this bodily mutiliation that has resulted in so much physical suffering, psychological turmoil, sexual dysfunction and locker room humiliation to our nation's trembling men and boys.

Is it any wonder that males fall further and further behind in education and employment? Should we be surprised that teenaged boys are consumed by free-floating, unfocused rage? That males far outnumber females in the prison population? That male legislators have proven incapable of thinking like adults?

"Why is it illegal to mutilate girls, but not boys?" An anguished cri de coeur heard across America. So simple a question; such insightful reasoning. This is indeed the burning question that consumes men's minds, turning all thoughts away from supposedly weightier, but less personally compelling, matters -- like getting an education, earning a living and caring for a family.

By the time a boy reaches the age of 10, his days and nights are haunted by one overarching thought: "First they circumcised me. Then they took away my tonsils and adenoids. Then my appendix. What part gets harvested next? I can't remember it happening, but hot damn! -- I sure bet I hated it. I'm so angry at being mutilated, I'm gonna go get tattooed from head to foot, and lotsa body piercings, as well"

A supporter of a similar measure in Santa Monica announced today that she is dropping her campaign because of Jewish protests that the measure would outlaw a religious practice deeply ingrained in Judaism and ordained by Holy Scripture. I trust that no wishy-washy deferral to a minority group's religious scruples -- or to bizarre claims that circumcision should be a decision left to the parents -- will hinder the efforts of the historically more enlightened San Francisco community.

Maybe, just maybe, in a happier future world, boys will be able to grow to adulthood without suffering the horrific trauma to which my generation was subjected. Yes, a new dawn lies ahead -- too late for me, but giving promise of happier lives for those yet unborn.

Now, let's talk about parents who force kids to go the dentist while they're still below the age of consent ..... I say: Let's also ban childhood orthodontics!

Mount Si

2011-06-05T16:38:00.000-07:00

Forty-five minutes east of Seattle is the town of North Bend, and rising above North Bend is the massive shape of Mount Si -- the crumbling remains of an ancient volcano, rising out of flat pasture land just before you reach the Cascade range.

I climb Mt. Si virtually every year, usually in the spring as soon as the snow melts. This year, the snow melted late. But here we are in June, and today I made my climb. My achievement is hardly remarkable around these parts; Wikipedia estimates that between 80,000 and 100,000 hikers visit the mountain annually.

Which is not to say that they all reach the summit. A well-maintained trail leads to the top, but it's a steep trail and it goes only up. And up. The trail is 4.0 miles in length, with an altitude gain of 3,500 feet. The summit elevation is advertised on trail signs as 4,167 feet above sea level.

The trail follows an endless series of switchbacks upward, passing through beautiful and very mature second growth timber that gradually becomes less dense as you climb. At the top, you break out of the trees onto a boulder field, with views all the way to Puget Sound and Seattle to the west, and -- on a clear day -- Mt. Rainier and Mt. Adams to the south. This year, moreover, many of the surrounding hills stood out sharply, still covered with snow.

But I do this climb less for the scenic beauty -- although that's certainly appreciated -- than as a conditioning tool to prepare for other hikes during the summer. I also surreptitiously keep track of my time -- just to see if I "still have it." I made the climb in 1 hour, 40 minutes and the descent in 1 hour, 20 minutes (crowds of fellow climbers coming down slowed my descent). I'm thus hiking as well as I ever have -- at least on Mt. Si -- so I'm pleased.

Above the summit boulder field is "The Haystack" -- a rocky dome that can be climbed only by a rather tricky scramble. I've scrambled to the top with friends lots of times with no particular concern. There have also been times, however, when I've unpredictably melted into a state of acrophobic panic about 2/3 of the way up, and -- shamefacedly -- slithered back down without reaching the top. The scramble is steep and exposed in places, and one slip could quite possibly be fatal. I was hiking alone today, and had no intention of doing the scramble without someone else along to keep an eye on me.

Today was supposed to be Seattle's warmest day of the year to date, and the sky was clear when I left home. By the time I reached the base of the mountain, however, the sun was obscured by a high overcast. (The overcast was high enough that Mt. Rainier was clearly visible beneath it.) I arrived at 10:30, thinking I'd beat the crowds, but for the first time ever (for me) the parking lot was jammed. Lots of folks going up and down -- and lots of dogs going with them -- but people-watching is half the fun on Si. No one climbs Si for a solitary wilderness experience.

So I'm happy that lots of people -- including lots of folks under 30 -- still enjoy vigorous hiking, and I'm happy that my strength and endurance still seem good. I'm also happy that Rainier, reigning majestically over all the lesser peaks, consented today to make herself visible.

----------------------

Photos, from top to bottom:

1. Mt. Si from the town of North Bend
2. Mt. Rainier, viewed from the top of Mt. Si
3. Climbers beginning the scramble up the Haystack.
4. Hikers on the trail, near the bottom
5. The Haystack, from the boulder field below

Lost generation revisited

2011-06-03T21:02:00.000-07:00

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
--Hemingway

When I think of Woody Allen, I think of college kids and young people lined up for a block waiting to see his latest movie. We learned to love him for his slapstick comedies. We later felt more adult, with quasi-Jewish sensibilities, watching Annie Hall, Zelig and Manhattan. We puzzled our way through his Ingmar Bergman phase. And then, we sort of lost touch. Now, when I review his list of movies, I realize that he kept directing films, but somehow I was no longer watching them.

But he remains in my mind as a filmmaker who appeals to young people. So it was a bit of a shock to go to the theater tonight, to see Midnight in Paris, and find myself surrounded by silver-haired baby boomers -- to find myself watching his ageing fans struggling up the aisle, easing themselves into seats. Where were the college kids, I wondered? Where were all the young couples?

Well, I guess they're watching Thor. Or Scream 4. Or X-Men: First Class. Or at home on their computers. It's a different generation, with different interests. For me, it's tempting to look back on the 60's and 70's -- when Woody Allen's star first rose -- as a long-lost Golden Age of Cinema.

But, of course, the moral of Midnight in Paris is that there were no actual Golden Ages, that every generation fixes upon some earlier time as its own Golden Age, an imaginary world that it creates in its own mind and imagines with nostalgia.

That may be the film's stated moral, but the cinematography totally undermines this lesson. Paris in the Twenties, in Allen's imagining, is visually a shining display of street lamps reflected from wet cobble stone streets. It's a city of smoky cafés and nightclubs filled with beautiful, clever people, and of salons attended by the greatest concentration of talent ever gathered together in one city since the Renaissance. Allen's Paris is, indeed, a moveable feast.

The film's rather loopy hero, Gil -- acted by Owen Wilson, who looks nothing like Woody Allen, but does an amazing job of imitating Allen's phrasing and tone of voice -- stumbles somehow back in time, and hangs out, improbably, night after night, with Hemingway, Scott and Zelda, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Buñuel, Cocteau, Dali, and the full complement of writers and artists who lived and worked in the Paris of the 1920's.

The plot is silly, the acting often seems a bit stilted, and Gil's present-day fiancée and step parents-to-be are right wing Republicans so stereotypically dull and xenophobic that you wonder what ever possessed Gil to propose to her in the first place. ("We both like pita bread," he explains, trying to find something they have in common.) But the portrayal of celebrities from the Twenties is irresistably interesting, as well as funny. Hemingway speaks in short, "true" sentences -- the way he wrote and the way I doubt he ever spoke. "Anyone want to box?" he asks loudly, as his friends say goodbye and leave the cafe in which they had been drinking.

But most of all, the film is worth seeing just as a romanticized but almost painfully beautiful re-creation of Paris in its by-gone days of glory, as well as a breathtaking travelogue to the Paris of today, a Paris that seems pretty darn "golden" even now.

Maybe Allen's moral is correct. Maybe Paris's Golden Age wasn't really all that golden, maybe every period of history only seems golden to subsequent generations. But you don't really believe it as you walk out of the theater, humming a Cole Porter tune and wondering where you can find yourself a glass of Pernod.

Fiat lux

2011-05-31T21:03:00.000-07:00

I returned from four days in California this afternoon, and discovered a burned-out light bulb. Not just any light bulb, but the one screwed into that one lamp in the living room that I have hooked up to a timer. Supposedly, various burglars, vandals, squatters, cat nabbers, the criminally insane, the merely idle and curious -- all those apt to end up inside my house in my absence -- will be deterred and driven off by my display of one bright, shining light.

Well, that shining light burned out in my absence, so its deterring glow didn't have much deterrent effect. Nevertheless, I'm happy to report, the house was intact and the cats still alive.

But my point was going to be -- and indeed there was one -- that it was a 150 watt bulb that went kaput, and I don't have any spares. What I do have -- aside from 100 watt bulbs, one of which I'm now using as a temporary substitute -- are some of those new energy saving fluorescent bulbs that we've been urged to buy.

I've tried them in other rooms. I should remark, for those of you who don't know me, that I'm far from being a fussy interior decorator. My worn and uncoordinated furnishings have appalled normal folks of all ages, backgrounds and sectarian beliefs. But I do know the difference between a room that's a relaxing, softly-lit retreat from the world's cares, and one that's lit up like the produce section at Safeway.

As these new bulbs advertise, they offer me the equivalent of 100 watts of incandescent lighting at the cost of only 26 watts of power. And that's great. In a kitchen or basement or attic. But fluorescent lighting is not the equivalent of soft, incandescent lighting, and I prefer not having it in my living room. Not until they develop fluorescent lights that give off the same spectrum as the old, energy-consuming incandescent lamps.

So, I'm relieved to read in today's New York Times that the government has not -- despite what we have all been led to believe -- outlawed incandescent bulbs. The law simply encourages manufacturers to find ways to increase energy efficiency, whatever the technology adopted. And manufacturers are doing so, finding ways to make even incandescent bulbs more efficient.

I'm a Sierra Club member. I'm as worried as you about looming energy shortages as the world develops. I have no interest in Glenn Beck's fulminations against the "nanny state," or his exhortations to hoard incandescent bulbs. In the years to come, conservation needs may force us to adopt many measures that now strike us as outrageous. I will cheerfully submit to them, in pursuit of the common good. But I'm relieved to read that -- at least, for now -- incandescent bulbs will remain on store shelves and shine expensively in our homes.

And I'll drop by the store tomorrow, and buy myself a couple of 150 watt-ers.

Dickens in New York

2011-05-25T19:56:00.000-07:00

In ninth grade, my English class was given the task of reading Dickens's novel, Great Expectations. Most of the details of the plot now escape me, but vividly etched in my 15-year-old brain was the character of Miss Havisham.

Pip, the hero of the novel, was first introduced to Miss Havisham when he was around six years of age; she summoned him to be a playmate for her adopted daughter. She was wealthy, she was old, and she was peculiar: She wore an old, yellowed wedding dress. She kept all the windows in her house tightly boarded up. All of the clocks were stopped at 8:40.

As time went on, Miss Havisham eventually showed Pip the room where, long ago, a wedding dinner had been prepared. In the center of the banquet table sat a moldy wedding cake, half eaten by mice and enmeshed in cobwebs on which spiders ran up and down. Miss Havisham explained to Pip that this was the room in which, once she was dead, she would be laid.

The gothic horror of this scene would be enough to fascinate any ninth grader, I'm sure. But when you're a young introvert --harboring secret fears that you yourself are doomed to age into an eccentric old recluse -- well, Dickens's portrayal of Miss Havisham becomes well nigh unforgettable.

I thought of Miss Havisham this week, of course, as I read of the death of Huguette Clark, heir to one of the great American fortunes, a fortune accumulated by her father over his lifetime and originating from his copper holdings in Montana. Miss Clark died this week at 104. Unlike Miss Havisham, Miss Clark's long-ago fiancé actually showed up for their wedding; he left her nine months later, however, and she found herself divorced at the age of 23. From that time on, she withdrew completely from society and lived with her mother in a Manhattan apartment.

She played with dolls and doll houses. She painted, and she played the harp. For lunches, she dined on crackers and sardines. For entertainment, she loved watching The Flintstones on television. She saw no one. After her mother died in 1963, she continued living alone in the same apartment until the 1980's, when she checked herself into a hospital where others could care for her. And that's where she lived for the last 25 or 30 years of her life.

Besides care providers, she spoke only to her attorney and her accountant. They allegedly fleeced her, not that she would have noticed any losses. Her will has not yet been made public. The main reaction of the public and the press to her death has been to speculate as to who would get her money.

Miss Clark came about as close to living the life of Miss Havisham as anyone could come in today's world. Unlike Miss Havisham, she did have nine months of wedded bliss -- although her former husband later claimed that their marriage was never consummated. Unlike Miss Havisham, who ultimately died of burns suffered when her wedding dress caught fire, Miss Clark died in apparent comfort under the best of medical care.

Miss Clark lacked a Charles Dickens to paint a picture of her presumably sad (although self-chosen) life. But she didn't really need him. Her life really speaks for itself. My 15-year-old self would have been stunned -- and no doubt unsettled -- to learn that a Miss Havisham really existed, a contemporary American woman, living in tragic isolation, surrounded by her money and her dolls.

A Miss Havisham for our times, she was, secluded in the heart of the Big Apple, marking time as the decades passed -- untouched by the bustle, the changes, the excitement, and the life of the great city all about her.

Kiril growing up

2011-05-22T09:25:00.000-07:00

Last November, I posted a tribute to Kiril Kulish, one of the original "Billy's" in the Broadway musical "Billy Elliot." It turned out to be my third most popular posting ever, with 150 hits.

Some of you who found it worth reading (and its links worth watching) might be interested in a recent interview of Kiril, a 17-year-old American-born dancer whose parents immigrated from the Ukraine. The interview was produced -- and produced very nicely -- by Russian television.

The YouTube video lasts about ten minutes. The interview itself is interspersed with cuts to scenes in which Kulish reprises some of his dance steps and acrobatics from the musical and attempts as an older teenager (his voice having lost much of its range when it changed) to sing the musical's signature song, which he accompanies with his own piano improvisations. The interview concludes with scenes from the 2009 Tony awards.

Kiril Kulish is now a student at the American Ballet Theatre (ABT) in New York.

Спасибо, Kiril, и удача!

P.S. -- The Russian interviewer himself never appears on camera. He asks quiet questions and keeps the focus on the person being interviewed. If only American television producers would take note!

O Rapturous Day!

2011-05-21T08:57:00.000-07:00

But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of the heavens, but my Father alone.
--Matthew 24:36

If you've been paying attention, you realize that at approximately 6 p.m. tonight, Pacific Daylight Time, those chosen by God will disappear from the face of the earth, having been assumed body and soul into heaven. I hope this warning reaches you in time.

Harold Camping is only the latest of the prophets to have predicted the timing of Doomsday. Much of Europe, reportedly, was petrified in the late tenth century, awaiting the dreaded year of A.D. 1000.

Despite attending Sunday School diligently during boyhood and adolescence, as well as having read my Bible avidly as a child, I'd never heard of the "Rapture" until the last decade. You can't find it there in the Bible, unless -- apparently -- you squint, focus on certain key obscurities, apply mathematics, draw inferences, and set angels to dancing on the head of a pin. An odd way for God to set forth his warnings to mankind, one might think. In fact, a major warning I took away from my own religious education was the one given in Matthew: Be vigilant, because the end will come when you least expect it.

My first real intimation that the Rapture was a concept taken seriously by some Christians came from reading the Portofino trilogy by Frank Schaeffer. These novels, both funny and sympathetic, are based on his own childhood in a missionary family. His parents, members of an obscure sect that had at one time splintered off from the Presbyterian church, had dedicated their lives to saving the lost Catholic souls of French-speaking Switzerland. One day, as he recounts in Zermatt, the final book of the trilogy, he awoke to find himself alone in the missionary compound. He instantly panicked, seized by guilty fear that the Saved had been "Raptured," and that he, all unworthy, had been left behind.

It says in the Bible that several amazing things will happen when Jesus zooms back to earth to snatch his elect up into the clouds at the Rapture. The moon will turn to blood. The water will turn to blood too. So I flushed the toilet ... .

After finding assurance in the toilet's clear water that his manifold adolescent sins had not yet caught up with him, he recalled with contrition the time that he had reduced a friend to uncontrollable tears by secretly putting red dye in the boy's toilet while his folks were away.

Schaeffer survived his childhood, and made the radical conversion as an adult from millennial Calvinism to Greek Orthodoxy.

I suspect that when we awake tomorrow, even our most devout friends and neighbors will still be here with us. For most of us, it's sufficient to recall that our personal encounter with eternity won't await an unpredictably timed Second Coming. Each of us is only a heartbeat away -- a burst aneurism, a car swerving across the center line -- from our own personal departure from earth.

The realization that the day and hour of our own personal demise is unknown should suffice. We can leave the timing of the termination of the universe itself to the mind of a Power higher than the angels, higher even than Mr. Camping.

Anthropomorphize much?

2011-05-19T16:13:00.000-07:00

I sit at my desk, shuddering, as genocide occurs all about me. Outside. Arboreal genocide.

Yes, once again I've had to hire "experts" to prune back the all too abundant foliage of the Pacific Northwest. Tree limbs have been providing bridges for squirrels and other varmints to traipse across onto my rooftop and -- potentially -- into my attic. The two trees growing in the parking strip have totally blocked my view of the street, and vice versa. A tiny holly bush, once prettily ornamental, has somehow grown -- like Topsy -- into a 25 foot prickly monster that now impinges on my driveway; it's developed roots, moreover, that threaten to dislodge boulders and permit my front lawn to slide down onto the sidewallk.

It had to be done. It should have been done earlier.

Still, I cringe. I grit my teeth as I hear power tools cutting into the living flesh of these beautiful plants. My trees. To some, my landscaping might seem malignant: a cancer gradually surrounding and tightening a chokehold on my house. An organic vise that seeks to squeeze the structure to death, and me within it. But to me, my trees are friendly protectors -- perhaps a bit too rambunctious, like a sheep dog with too much hair, one that bounds about, jumping up on the guests -- but essentially loving and devoted. And I have returned their affection how? By hiring assassins to cut off their limbs. And in the case of the holly tree, to actually "put it to sleep" or -- to call a spade a spade -- brutally execute it.

I listen now to the tearing and slicing of the power tools. Soon will come the chipping, as my friends' bodies and limbs are fed through the chipper, swiftly ground into cellulosic hamburger.

My house will look 100 percent better when the crew leaves. But at what expense? At what loss to my own self-respect -- to my self-image as a kind and moral man? It's such an old story, isn't it? Especially here in the Northwest. Man's inhumanity to tree.

You always hurt the ones you love.

Messing around

2011-05-18T13:10:00.000-07:00

I love Wikipedia. I can look up any topic under the sun, and instantly find a readable article. The article will have resulted from a collaborative effort by writers interested in the topic, one that has been peer reviewed and revised, rather than edited by some higher authority. Wikipedia articles are updated within minutes of any new development affecting their contents.

I also own a couple of old standard encyclopedias. They, of course, are not updated on a daily basis. They are not updated ever (except, perhaps, by yearly supplements obtainable by subscription). And this makes them valuable to the reader in a different and unintended way: they portray the era in which they were written, now frozen, as it were, in amber.

I was just thumbing through the "H" volume of the World Book Encyclopedia, 1955 edition. The World Book was one of the better encyclopedias published at that time. Unlike the Encyclopedia Britannica, the oldest and most prestigious of encyclopedias, it was aimed largely at children and high school students, although many of its articles were sufficiently sophisticated to be of some interest to the adult reader as well.

Anyway, I was browsing the article entitled "Hobby," one of those articles clearly designed to appeal to younger readers. It was accompanied by a large number of photographs showing children engaged in common hobbies of the time. Let me list them for you, and then explain why I found these photographs interesting:

Model railroading
Magic tricks
Archery
Ham radio
Raising livestock
Pets
Skiing
Ice skating
Soap box derbies
Kite flying
Building model airplanes
Rigging a model schooner
Cooking
Wood carving

Sewing doll dresses

Making dolls

Weaving

"Trapping" wild animals with a mounted camera

Stamp collecting

Doll collecting

Insect/butterfly collecting and mounting

Collecting bottle caps and using them in building models

Sea shell collecting

Chemistry work in a home laboratory

Microscopes

Rock collecting

Music (piano, violin, etc.)

Fashion design and illustration

Construction and use of homemade telescopes

A few more photos showing "unusual" hobbies

Different hobbies obviously appealed to kids of different ages -- bottle cap collecting, perhaps, among some of the younger ones; the scientifically oriented hobbies more among high school students.

I doubt if any of these hobbies sound particularly bizarre to us today. They all still exist within our collective memory. And obviously, kids still ski (or snowboard), and they still take music lessons. But how many kids do you know who would confess to spending any time at all engaged in most of these pursuits? Or would even understand the point? A few, I'm sure. And some adults may still collect stamps or dolls, or build model railway layouts -- interests continued from childhood, or picked up as a nostalgic return to their own childhoods.

But when this edition of World Book came out, these hobbies were part of the common culture of American childhood. What happened?

I suspect that the internet and the computer are primary factors in their demise. Some of the strong urges of children to develop new skills, to learn, to compete among themselves, and to find common interests with which to bond among themselves are now satisfied by computer games, social networks, specialized software programs, and on-line music and videos. The hobbies discussed in World Book arose out of a different milieu. For example, it might well seem strange to most kids today to buy and maintain a layout with model steam trains, trains themselves having been marginalized in our world, and steam engines having disappeared -- but they still build and collaborate in make-believe worlds of their own, using software available to them in an enormous variety of on-line computer games.

Still, reading the encyclopedia article, and looking at the (doubtlessly idealized) photos of kids painstakingly building models, or mounting stamps in a stamp album, makes me feel that something has been lost. Maybe it's kids' ability to take endless pains working on a project important to themselves. Maybe it's the fact that so many of the photos show children alone, happily amusing themselves, rather than participating in a group activity. (Which is a strange reaction for me to have, because too many of today's kids use computer games to isolate themselves from "in real life" friendships.) Maybe it's just the realization that the kids in the photos are doing something slow and unhurried, with maximum focus and concentration. They aren't watching TV and texting friends at the same time they are mounting butterflies.

In reality, I suspect that kids in general may well be happier today than they were in 1955, and certainly as quick mentally. Their ability to multi-task may in fact be pushing our evolution as a species to a new and higher level. Maybe we haven't lost anything at all, except in the same sense that we've "lost" the horse and buggy. I guess I'll just chalk my feelings up to nostalgia.

After all, I'm a guy who's also been inclined to long for the days when knighthood was in flower -- forgetting that the odds strongly suggest that while the knights were being knightly, I would have been an illiterate serf out plowing the field.

-----------------------

(5-18-11)After publishing the above post, I learned from (ironically) Wikipedia that the World Book Encyclopedia is still published in annual editions (but under different ownership) in a print format. The encyclopedia was last given a major revamp in form and content in 1988. According, again, to Wikipedia, it is now marketed to students 15 years and older, and "shows particular strength in scientific, technical, and medical subjects." I would not say that these comments applied to the 1955 edition, which is well written but seems to me to have been geared, in part, to students several years younger, as well as those of high school age and older.

By motor car to Oxiana

2011-05-15T11:21:00.000-07:00

As many have pointed out to me, a visit to Iran seems like an odd way to amuse yourself. But then, it's always seemed that way.

Since my return home last month, I've finally got around to reading one of the great classics of travel writing, a memoir of travel through Persia (Iran) and Afghanistan in the 1930's: The Road to Oxiana, by the British writer, Robert Byron.

Byron was one of a once-familiar breed of English eccentrics: He had an urge to travel to places largely unvisited by Westerners, he was a self-educated expert in Eastern art and architecture in general, and he was fascinated by very specific types of Muslim art. He had strong views -- he despised those romantic forms of Muslim architecture most popular in the West: those of the Moguls, best represented by the Taj Mahal, and those of the Moors, such as the Alhambra.

He had a keen ear for language, and his book reproduces many unusual and hilarious conversations, ones supposedly recalled verbatim and written out phonetically. For example, using musical abbreviations to show changing voice dynamics, he records comments by the Afghani ambassador to Persia, in which the ambassador discusses his visit to the opera in Rome:

(m)Italian lady she sit beside me. She is (eyes blazing ff) big lady, yah! great? no, fat. (mf) She more fat than Madame Egypt [the Egyptian Ministress] and her breast is (cr) too big. (mf) It fall out of box, so. Much diamonds and gold on it. (pp) I am frightened. I see if it shall be in my face. (f) I suffocate.

The book, written in diary form, tells of the expedition he and a friend -- from their university days at Oxford -- undertook in 1933-34, at the age of 28, from Cyprus, through Palestine and Syria, to Persia and Afghanistan. By the time of his trip, Byron had already become a well-known writer and art critic, famous especially for championing the importance of Byzantine art.

Byron hoped ultimately to reach the Amu Darya river, which separated Afghanistan from the Soviet Union -- a river known as the Oxus during the time of Alexander the Great. Political conditions in Afghanistan barred him from ever catching sight of the river, but he did travel through the region through which it flowed, which he called Oxiana.

But the real objective of the trip was to view Persian architecture in both Persia itself and in Persia's former territory located then (as it is now) in Afghanistan. My own interest in Persian architecture totally pales to insignificance by comparison. My fascination with the book was rather in comparing Byron's observations of Persia in 1933 with what I was able to see for myself last month. Byron visited most of the same cities and major archeological sites that I did.

In 1933, as in 2011, Persia was a difficult land in which to travel. The only serious difficulty now, however, for an American at least, is in obtaining a visa. In 1933, on the other hand, Persia was a huge, thinly populated expanse of land with a rudimentary road system. It was surrounded by other nations equally remote. The few Westerners that Byron encountered were, for the most part, either diplomats or professional archeologists and art historians.

Access from Europe was not by arrival at Tehran Airport, but by dirt roads across the inhospitable expanses of Syria and Iraq. He found Iraq -- in the region of Baghdad -- to be as disagreeable as I'm sure our own military did during the recent war:

[Mesopotamia] is a mud plain .... From this plain rise villages of mud and cities of mud. The rivers flow with liquid mud. The air is composed of mud refined into a gas. The people are mud-coloured; they wear mud-coloured clothes and their national hat is nothing more than a formalized mud-pie.

Once into Iran, everything changed. They entered a land of beauty.

Up and down we sped through the fresh tonic air, to the foot of the mountains; then up and up, to a pass between jagged pine-tufted pinnacles that mixed with the pattern of the stars. ... [W]e dined to the music of streams and crickets, looking out on a garden of moon-washed poplars and munching baskets of sweet grapes.

Persia was not always to be so idyllic; the dirt roads, the lack of bridges that compelled fording of streams, the roads blocked by landslides -- all these obstacles took, at times, their toll on Byron's patience, although not on his sense of humor. But I envied him his opportunity of visiting what is now Iran at a time when it was all new to Western visitors, when simply moving from one town to another could be a challenge, often requiring days of delay, awaiting the right weather or the approval of some minor dignatary.

Iran is still largely unvisited, by Americans at least, but once you're there, you now travel over modern, well-engineered freeways.

Byron visited many of the same sites that I did. He visited the Shrine of the Imam Reza in Mashad, as I did. But while our group timorously followed our guide about the outer precincts of the shrine, our women enshrouded in chadors, Byron dressed himself in what he hoped would look like Persian garb and, walking all alone, penetrated the central portions of the shrine, forbidden to infidels. He looked all about while others prayed, gazing with wonder at the beauty of the building interiors. Eventually, sensing growing suspicion among the faithful, he made a fast departure before a riot could begin. Dangerous and imprudent, perhaps, but the stories he had to tell (and, of course, did)!

He visited Persepolis, as we did. As ruins go, we didn't find it to be overly crowded, but there were still quite a few tourists -- Iranian, Asian, and European -- wandering about reading signs and guide books, and listening to guides. Byron found the site empty and deserted, as it had been for centuries, except for the presence of an archeologist from the University of Chicago who was excavating the site. This American professor claimed all rights to the monumental ruin, and forbade Byron from taking any photographs of "his" Persepolis. (Byron outwitted him in the end, of course.)

Byron also visited Shiraz, and Yazd, and Kerman -- all towns that I also enjoyed visiting -- before eventually moving on to Afghanistan. His descriptions of these towns, again, show us how much has changed: sleepy villages are now towns and small cities that -- while still picturesque and exotic -- have definitely become part of the modern world.

My reaction to Byron's book is similar in some ways, of course, to what it would be to any well written tourist guide to any destination from the 1930's. Fascinating comparisons between places "then" and "now," closer to home, can be made by reading the Guides to the States prepared by writers for the WPA during the Depression. But Persia/Iran has changed so drastically in the same period -- both in appearance and in accessability -- that Byron's book presents an especially dramatic contrast, and arouses feelings of strong nostalgia for a time when the world seemed much larger and more diverse. A time when just getting to Persia required more time, effort, stamina, and logistics than were available to most people.

Now, "Persia" is less than 24 hours away -- once you have that precious visa!

And I'll be in Scotland afore ye

2011-05-10T19:09:00.000-07:00

In the spring, a lad's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of -- getting the hell out of the house and doing some hiking!

After my highly successful and entertaining hike across England last summer, following the course of Hadrian's Wall, I plan to follow up in August with a 95-mile Scottish hike along the West Highland Trail. This trail runs from a northern Glasgow suburb in the south, to Fort William in the north. It follows old military tracks, Highlanders' footpaths, and "drovers' roads." (As we all know, a drover's road is a track used in olden times for driving livestock to market. We can picture Glasgow as at one time the Kansas City of Britain, I suppose.)

The trail starts out in the lowlands, ambles along the length of Loch Lomond, rambles through glens and low passes, and ascends into the highlands. It crosses spectacular moorland, climbs the "Devil's Staircase," passes through forest lands, and finally drops down into Fort William -- a "capital" of the Scottish Highlands (second only to Inverness), and located at the base of Ben Nevis.

Ben Nevis is the highest mountain in the British Isles. While the 4,409-foot elevation of its summit may not sound impressive to us Americans, the weather can be wild and unpredictable, taking several climbers' lives every year. I'm staying an extra night in Fort William, in the hopes of completing a successful climb (well, "walk" would be more candid) to the summit.

Once again, I'll be pampering myself while hiking. No tents, no heavy backpack. I'll be staying at B&B's and carrying only a day pack each day, leaving my baggage behind each morning and finding it mysteriously waiting for me each evening at my destination.

The primary hazard, apparently, will be the "midges."

Midges are small, two-winged flying insects, they love Scotland and walkers on the West Highland Way, they can smell your sweat! ... Biting midges fly in swarms (big huge swarms, that follow you around) and usually don't stray too far from their breeding (biting grounds) grounds.
--Walking Scotland (on-line)

I'll be heading off to Scotland with good hiking boots, a good camera -- and several gallons of DEET. I've got some good Scots blood in my veins -- neither miles nor moorland nor multitudes of midges shall stay my sure passage.